What do ornately carved blocks of granite and marble say to you? Perhaps a few words in commemoration of the life that has passed. If it was someone you knew and loved, it is doubtful that the cold stone can ever warm your heart. Year after year millions of us travel thousands of miles to see, touch and take an obligatory snapshot in front of national monuments and memorials. The events and the people who lived them are long gone. Your visit brings them back to life. Your memories keep them alive while those personal photos remind friends and future generations where you were. Most speeches make historical references which are forgettable or worse regrettable. Make yours meaningful and memorable by showing the old in a new way, exemplifying the example, and capturing the context.
Do you remember way back in 1994 when a friend was someone you called on the phone because there wasn’t email and Mark Zuckerberg’s face didn’t even have zits. What used to require pen, paper and patience (you recall the post office) is now instantly received. The context for your communications has virtually unlimited reach and speed. Depending on how many unread emails are clogging your inbox, this may delight or depress you. All those unread emails in your spam folder serve as a memorial to the junk mail that used to fill your mail box. However, the content of all those ads remains virtually unchanged, save for the more risqué offers. Your audience is being inundated with messages and yet, they are probably responding just like you. Every message from a family member and friend is opened first. You respond to those closest to you. Kinship and friendship are the contexts which consistently capture your attention.
The stories you share with family about your friends and with friends about your family memorialize the moments of your life. The heartbreaks bring you closer. The humorous reminds you that comedy is just tragedy happening to someone else. Your stories, when well told, reconnect your listeners with their life story. Your personal history is just like everyone else’s, personal. Exemplifying this personal connection turns an audience of strangers into a group of friends. Sharing a part of your personal history makes you less of a mystery, and your message, more meaningful. Choose your stories carefully. Make sure your examples match your message and your audience. What your friends find hysterical may make your mother hysterical. Being a great example not to follow is regrettable, but when your private acts and public works respect and connect your family, your friends, and your listeners you present a rock solid character.
When traveling with friends and family to these memorials you see something old in a new way. Your experience is new while what you are seeing is old. What you are seeing is unfamiliar yet you are sharing it with familiar people. William Faulkner said, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” History is not a memorial to what happened. It is what is happening to you when you recall the past. Memorials exist as much, if not more, for the living than the dead. History is living. Your greatest triumphs and tragedies are memorialized in your history. What is a familiar story to you is new to your audience. Learn to look at what you knew anew and watch the past become present in your presentations.
Your trip along with thousands of others is memorialized in a Facebook photo album. The stone inscriptions have been converted to digital bits and yet what has really changed. Each reminds us where you have been and what was done. When your presentation is well done what is old is renewed, what was carved in cold stone lives in your listeners’ hearts and what is past is a meaningful moment.