Memoirist Brian Kraemer views 20-year seasons of life like seasons of the year. In his latest book, “Spring, the First Twenty Years: My Memoirs”, he recounts his experiences with obsessive compulsive disorder. Read the synopsis below.
We are living stories, being written moment by moment, experience by experience, each of us, a book written without effort. Every thought, word, action, and intention, conscious and unconscious, fills our pages.
Without paper or pencil, we build a living record of ourselves. Nothing will be lost or forgotten and someday will be read by all, each story as meaningful and valuable as the next.
Though grossly inferior to these living books, I am compelled to put my experiences into a written form. For whatever reason, I need to write. The word waterfall is quickly forgotten in the presence of even a light mist on one's face from a real one, but there seems to be value in writing it anyway. With this in mind, I do my best to convey my life's experiences and thoughts about these experiences.
My story is expressed in short chapters, giving the reader time to pause for contemplation, meditation, and absorption. A book that gives you permission to take a break every few minutes is usually a fast read. Its demands are few and thus easier to come back to again and again.
Ideas are to be digested like food. After eating a good meal, the things worth keeping become part of us. The rest is eliminated. A book of ideas lacks value unless it prompts us to become something more than we were before we experienced it.
I have divided my life into nature’s cycles of spring, summer, fall, and winter, each comprising twenty years. It is my belief that everything in our lives is related to everything else and as such, we are born in the spring, labor in the summer, reap a harvest in the fall, and prepare for death in winter. Spring has always begun the cycle again.
I write this memoir mid-fall and hope to continue it through at least mid-winter. Perhaps someone might be so kind as to write the final chapter for me, but I hope to continue expressing my life’s experiences on paper as near to my transition into the next realm as possible.
