CREATE YOUR TESTAMENT

 Ready to begin?  Start with the Starter Guide. 

Creating a Testament does not require the skills of a polished writer, nor does it require you to sit down one day and write the story of your life from beginning to end.  There is no single right way to begin.  Start wherever it feels easiest, most natural, or most alive in your memory.  You might begin with an experience that changed you, a person who shaped you, a mistake that taught you something, a belief you arrived at or abandoned, a principle that guided your decisions, or something you wish you had understood sooner.  You are not simply writing a book.  You are gathering the pieces of a life and considering which of them are worth passing on.

Some pieces of your Testament may already exist.  Letters, journals, photographs, recordings, stories you have told your family, things you wrote years ago, and reflections recorded at different points in your life may all contain parts of what you eventually want to preserve.  You do not have to work chronologically.  One memory may lead to another, a simple question may uncover a story you have not thought about in years, and a few sentences may reveal something you want to explore much more deeply.  Gather first, explore, return to things, and add to them.  Your Testament can take shape gradually.

A Testament may contain stories, but the stories are not necessarily the point.  What did the experience teach you?  Did it change you?  What do you understand now that you did not understand then?  Questions and writing prompts can help you explore the different parts of a life: childhood and family, education and work, relationships, faith and beliefs, challenges and accomplishments, travel and adventure, the words and people that influenced you, your values, your principles and priorities, and the lessons you discovered along the way.

Some questions may produce only a sentence or two, while others may uncover an entire story or reveal something you have never completely resolved.  The purpose is not to answer every possible question about your life or to create a comprehensive record of everything that happened to you.  It is to discover what you believe is worth leaving behind.

Your words do not have to be perfect.  They need to be yours.  A Testament is not valuable because its author writes beautifully.  Its value comes from the opportunity to hear a person speak for themselves about what they experienced, what they valued, what they questioned, what they learned, and what they ultimately came to believe was important.  The skills of a polished writer are not needed in order to produce a worthy and satisfying Testament.

You may write your Testament yourself, or you may speak your thoughts and have them transcribed.  You may incorporate photographs, letters, documents, recordings, or other materials that help preserve what you want another person to understand.  Your Testament might ultimately exist in print, digital, audio, video, or some combination of these forms.  The form is less important than preserving your reflections in a way that remains recognizably your own.

For some people, writing and organizing a Testament will come easily.  Others may know that they have things they want to preserve but have difficulty knowing where to begin, deciding what matters, organizing what they already have, or putting their thoughts into words.  A Testament Guide can help.  A Testament Guide listens, asks thoughtful questions, and helps draw out the memories, reflections, and wisdom a person wants to preserve.  For someone who would rather speak than write, a Guide could conduct recorded interviews and preserve the person's answers in their own words.  A Guide might also help organize existing material or recognize places where an important thought or story has been started but deserves further exploration.

The purpose of a Testament Guide is not to create someone else's Testament for them or to turn their thoughts into the Guide's version of what they should have said.  The Testament belongs to its author.  A Guide's role is to help the author discover, develop, organize, and preserve what they themselves want to say.

A final Testament looks backward on a life, but the idea of someday creating one can begin much earlier.  Imagine being introduced to the idea of your own Testament long before it is time to write the final one.  You might begin asking yourself what kind of person you want to become, what characteristics you want to demonstrate, what principles will guide your decisions, and what matters enough that you want it to shape the way you live.  You might also begin asking a more difficult question: if you someday look honestly at whether you lived according to those principles, what will you find?  Those questions do not have to wait until the end of life.

At significant stages of adulthood, a person could periodically stop and return to these questions.  These earlier reflections would not be Testaments, and they would not need to be published or shared with anyone.  They could remain completely private.  They would be Pre-Testamental Reflection Logs: a record of what you thought, valued, questioned, hoped for, and believed at a particular point in your life.

At twenty-five, you might discover that you have never actually decided what principles will guide your life, and there is time to choose them.  At forty-five, you might discover that the life you are living bears little resemblance to the life you once said you wanted, and there is still time to change direction.  At sixty-five, you might recognize relationships that need repairing, apologies that need making, gratitude that has never been expressed, wisdom that needs sharing, or work you still want to accomplish.  There is still time to do those things.

These reflections could also require us to examine the distance between the principles we claim and the lives we actually live.  Someone who identifies generosity as a guiding principle might ask, Am I generous?  Someone who says that family is among the most important things in life might ask, Would the people I love recognize that from the way I treat them?  Someone who says that honesty, kindness, courage, faithfulness, curiosity, service, or forgiveness matters might confront the harder question: Does my life demonstrate it?  The purpose is not to judge a life before it is finished.  It is to recognize the distance between what we say matters and how we actually live while there is still time to do something about it.

Someday, when it is time to create your Testament, those Reflection Logs may give you something memory alone cannot: your younger self in your own words.  You will be able to see what endured, what changed, what you once thought you knew, what experience taught you otherwise, which questions followed you through life, and perhaps whether the person you hoped to become resembles the person you eventually became.  The final Testament is retrospective, but anticipating that future reflection may influence how you live while there is still time to change.

The Testament Society is developing resources to make this process easier, including a Starter Guide, organizational guidance, a Testament journal, writing prompts, activities designed to connect memories with values, and personal assistance from a Testament Guide.  These resources are not intended to tell you what your Testament should say.  They are intended to help you ask the questions, gather the pieces, explore thoughts that deserve further attention, and preserve what only you can provide.

What have you discovered that is worth leaving behind?