Perhaps its the frustrated historian in me, but the title for this article in the Christian Science Monitor caught my eye. It’s titled Presidents’ Day Thoughts on Monuments to Decent Lives and written by Joseph H. Cooper. It’s a thoughtful take on the idea of personal biography and what we can leave behind. Nothing is more powerful than our own stories.

It takes a special kind of following to warrant being memorialized on a postage stamp, let alone on coin or currency…Still, each of us, in our own way, carves out a bit of history that should be set down – for our own edification, and for each of our families and a few friends.

He pens some thoughts for his son at the end and I immediately thought of my two daughters. There will be times in their growing lives that they will wonder who their father was: what he saw that amazed him, what he experienced that influenced him, and he did that made a difference. And there’s room to include the less than perfect moments that taught hard lessons.

This isn’t an exercise that needs to be put off for when we reach a certain age. Consider it an organic document, one that lives to be added on to. Consider how he ends the article:

Appraisals of one’s worth or contributions do not require book-length memoirs. Monuments to a decent life do not require marble or granite. And nothing you set down has to be written in stone.