Listen for the Family Stories Told in July
There is something about July holidays that slows people down long enough to actually be together. The cousins fly in, and pile into the grandparent’s house that feels too small and exactly right all at the same time, and somewhere around the second or third night, someone starts telling a story nobody’s heard quite that way before.
I think of a family I worked with once who returned to the same small town in Montana every July for a week scheduled around the local rodeo. The family consists of three, sometimes four generations under one roof, great-uncles and step-family and grandchildren all present together, thirty-plus years running. But honestly, the setting is almost beside the point. I have heard the same tradition from other families who gather around a campfire at a lodge in the Rockies, and from a family who spends every summer together staying on a vineyard in Italy. Different backdrop, same pull. When people who love each other are finally in one place, at the same time, for long enough, the stories start being shared. Nobody has to ask twice.
That instinct is older than any of us, and it doesn’t need a big occasion to show up. It just needs time, proximity, and someone willing to listen. Long before anyone had a phone to record with, families told each other who they were by telling each other what events happened in their life. Who left home at seventeen and never looked back. Who married against everyone’s advice. Who almost didn’t make it through a hard winter, and did. That is how a family knows its lore. Not through documents, but through stories, told from one generation to the next as something to be cherished.
So if this month finds you back at whatever your family’s version of the rodeo is… a lake, a cabin, a kitchen table that’s hosted forty years of the same people, this might be the year you finally ask. You don’t need a plan, and you certainly don’t need a microphone. You just need one honest question and the patience to let the answer be told. Ask your grandfather what he remembers about the winter before he met your grandmother. Ask your step-mother what she was most afraid of at twenty-five. Ask about the thing nobody in the family quite talks about, gently, and see what unfolds.
I think that can be an important gift tucked inside all of July’s noise. The long drives, the crowded porches, the relative who tells the same joke every year and somehow it’s still funny. Underneath all that is one more chance for the people who hold your family’s history to pass a little more of it on to you, while they’re still here to do the passing.
I will be carrying all of this with me to Mindvalley University in Tallinn, Estonia this month, where I am scheduled to give a talk on Legacy Preservation — on what it actually means to make sure the people we love are remembered for who they are. My work has always been built around one concept: that a life’s legacy deserves to be preserved in the actual words and voice of the person who lived it.
Wherever July family holidays take you this year, enjoy your time with loved ones and ask the questions. Pause, then let them tell you. Listen for the wisdom, and please try to record it.
P.S. Please come find us on Instagram. We’re sharing more of these stories all summer long.
