This is something for an anthropologist – a PhD project maybe? I’d so much love to see this happening.
So; recently my dad shared an email with me that he wrote to a friend of his who is three decades younger than he is. The person he wrote to had emotional issues with her mum. It was about clashes of values and directions and goals in life. So my dad shared how he sees those two generations in question and in which different historic fields of values, politics and resource-availability they grew up and what conflicts are unavoidable in that encounter.
It was fascinating to read and it made me think how such “a letter of good advise” to another generation might have sounded 100 or 500 years ago.
Isn’t it such states of mind in which those letters are written that look at the zeitgeist and the nature of change most authentically and… human?
I’d love to see someone collecting such letters. Maybe in different cultures as well.
Interesting….not that my parents ever wrote advice to me in a letter. On a grand scale, it might be worth the effort to compile pages of the advice/words one has received … that which was so important as to have been locked into the memory. I’m talking about the one comment in a million that somehow stood out from all the rest…and that has come back to mind when searching for the way through or to.
XX Susan XX