Telling Your Story

For Chuck Warren, the story of his life is best told as a series of outstanding moments.

In a segment called "Float Like a Butterfly, Sting Like a Bee," the 73-year-old tells of a chance encounter seven years ago with boxing great Muhammad Ali at an Indiana airport.

Warren wasn't particularly a fan of boxing, but he had a small figurine of Ali when he was a child.

He doesn't remember what they talked about, but he remembers the boxer's speech was broken by Parkinson's disease.

The story is part of a memoir he's writing in a class at the Center for Personal Growth.

"A memoir can be anything about your life," Warren said. "It doesn't have to be from birth to now. My memoir is a series of vignettes — experiences that stick out in my mind for one reason or another."

Doice J. Osborne has led the class for about a decade. It's a spin off of a program Warren started about the idea of "sage-ing" or conscious aging, described as living in the second half of life with a focus on coming to terms with mortality, serving as an elder in the community and practicing activities including keeping a journal.

"When people retire they may feel like they have no purpose," Warren said.

Osborne, who has a background in mental health, encourages people to write and reflect on their lives.

Faced with a blank page, some people may not know what to do, so she holds classes seasonally for people who don't know how to get started in writing their memoir, she said. She held this season's first class recently, and it runs through March 25.

Osborne begins classes by reading news articles and studies explaining the benefits of memoir writing.

Breast cancer patients who wrote about their experience each week for three weeks showed improvements in post-traumatic stress and fatigue, according to a 2012 study published in the U.S. National Library of Medicine.

People with asthma who wrote about stressful events in their lives saw improved lung function, according to a 1999 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

And people who wrote about their feelings related to stressful events for just 20 minutes a day saw improvements in their physical health after a few sessions, according to a 1980 study at the University of Texas in Austin.

"Keeping a journal is very therapeutic," Osborne said. "It's a healing process — writing and sharing your most personal thoughts.

"Most of us want to also leave a legacy for our families."

Before he began writing his own story, Warren said he realized he didn't know much about his father.

"I want to leave something for my son," he said. "I want him to know my experiences and the lessons I've learned."

Warren has written about 15 vignettes so far.

The class has one rule: No critiquing.

"The title was cliché, but it caught my attention," Shirley Curtis-Ference, a 71-year-old class participant, said about Warren's excerpt on meeting Ali. "It's interesting how some people, some moments influence us so greatly that we have to write about them.

"There's a value in sharing our stories. Someone may share something and it'll remind me of an experience in my life that I may not have remembered before. We bounce off one another, and it helps me look at moments in my own life more closely."

 From The Lakeland Ledger, February 22, 2015