9/26/2026
Yesterday I listened to a Chinese podcast about how the hosts started a radio station in the 1980s, when people still commonly referred to Beijing as Peking.
As they talked about those early days, I suddenly felt that I was listening to history. Something that happened more than 40 years ago, when it was simply part of someone's ordinary life, can suddenly become meaningful again when someone tells the story today.
Their conversation reminded me of a discussion I recently had with some old classmates about writing.
One question naturally comes up:
What can I write about?
For someone over 70, there is something we have that younger people don't yet have: decades of lived experience.
Writing can turn that experience into something that can be remembered, examined, and passed on.
You have witnessed changes that younger generations know only from history books. You have made mistakes and learned from them. You may have raised a family, built a career, experienced losses and successes, moved from one place to another, and watched society change around you.
But when we are busy living and working, it is easy to accumulate experiences without ever stopping to examine them.
Writing makes us slow down.
When you write about something that happened decades ago, you may discover that you understand it differently today. You begin to ask: Why did this happen? What was I thinking at the time? What did I learn? What would I do differently now?
In that sense, writing is not simply recording the past. It is a way of making sense of it.
Some of those experiences may become useful to other people. Some may simply become a record for your children or grandchildren. And some may be valuable only to you.
That is why the value of writing is not only what a writer gives to readers. The act of writing can give something back to the writer.
Writing can also be a form of independence in later life.
A person who continues writing in later life often develops—or already possesses—qualities that are valuable far beyond writing:
A reflective mind.
She doesn't simply experience things; she asks, What does this mean? Why did this happen? What can I learn from it?
Inner motivation.
Without a boss, paycheck, or deadline, she still finds a reason to sit down and work on something that matters to her.
Independence.
She doesn't need constant entertainment or other people to tell her how to spend her time.
A desire to contribute.
She may feel that the knowledge and experience she has accumulated shouldn't simply disappear with her.
Patience.
Writing is slow. It requires sitting alone, thinking, revising, and sometimes receiving little recognition.
A continuing sense of identity.
Retirement can take away a professional identity—doctor, teacher, manager, scientist, or engineer. Writing can become another way of saying, I am still someone who creates.
A tolerance for solitude.
Writing often requires considerable time alone. But being alone is not necessarily the same as being lonely. Solitude can give us space to think, remember, and create.
Perhaps this is one of the gifts of growing older: we have accumulated enough life to have something to say, but we also have enough distance from some of those experiences to see them differently.
We don't have to write a memoir. We don't have to be professional writers. We don't even have to believe that anyone else will read what we write.
What seems ordinary to us today may become history to someone else tomorrow.
The people on that podcast were simply telling stories about a radio station they started 40 years ago. Yet to me, their memories suddenly became a window into another China—a China that younger people know mostly through books and photographs.
That made me think: perhaps our memories are not as ordinary as we think they are.
We have lived through a piece of history.
Writing gives us a way to leave a small record of it—not because everything we experienced was extraordinary, but because an ordinary life, honestly remembered, can become meaningful to someone who comes after us.
