Sometimes I think I should have started recording things a little sooner.
There would have been more stories to leave behind, and perhaps I could have preserved moments that I have already forgotten. At the same time, I think it may not be too late.
Only now am I beginning to understand more clearly what I want to leave behind and why I want to write things down.
At first, I wanted to document my experiences.
Learning new technologies, making things, solving problems, and getting things wrong along the way. I thought the record might help if I encountered the same problem again years later, or perhaps help someone else.
But that was not the only reason.
I also hoped that one day my child might read what I had written. I wanted to leave a record of the things that interested me, the thoughts I had, and the time I spent with my family.
That was one reason I chose the experience of making a game with my child as the first story about developing something.
I wanted that time to be remembered.
At first, I also wanted to leave my child a lesson or a message. Perhaps the values I held dear or the things my experiences had taught me would be useful one day.
But the more I thought about it, the more my perspective changed.
Would what mattered to me matter to my child as well? Would my child see the experiences I considered good in the same light?
Even when people experience the same event, they may understand it differently. Their lives and experiences can lead them to discover entirely different meanings in the same story.
Then why should I decide in advance how I want to be remembered?
If I wrote that way, I felt that, at some point, I might leave behind the person I wanted to appear to be rather than the person I actually was.
So I came to a simple conclusion.
Just leave things as they were.
What I enjoyed, the choices I made, and the things I regretted. Moments when I became absorbed in something for no particular reason, and the ways my thinking changed over time.
Not every experience needs a lesson. I do not have to preserve only the good parts of myself.
How the record is understood belongs to the reader. Even how my child might think about me one day is something I want to leave to my child.
Then another thought occurred to me.
Surely there will be times in the future when I want to say something to my child. Perhaps I will want to share a lesson from an experience or explain a value that matters to me.
Would that contradict my decision?
But wouldn't that simply be who I was at that moment, too?
Today I want to leave things as they are. At first, I wanted to convey a message. My thinking may change again in the future.
That does not mean one version is the real me and another is not.
Authenticity may come not from thinking consistently, but from being honest about what I believed at each moment.
That sentence seems to express how I feel now.
Even if my thinking changes as time passes, I do not have to rewrite an old record to match my current views. I can leave what I thought then, and write that I think differently now.
That brings me back to the beginning.
It might have been nice to start sooner. I could have left a more vivid record of what I thought and experienced back then.
But I cannot know whether I would have approached writing with the same feelings at the time.
Maybe I would not have felt any need to keep a record. Maybe I would have written completely different stories.
That person would still have been me.
I do not know how much I will write in the future or how long I will keep going. Even what I think now may change.
For now, I simply want to leave a record that I am thinking this way today.
If I return to these words years later and find that I see things differently, I can write down those thoughts, too.