Reverend Karen has been talking this year about the theme of “Generations.” Sitting at two adult-sized tables moved into the YFM room for our session, it was impossible not to reflect on the generational theme of childhood around us. As it happened, I’d also been thinking of a writing topic related to childhood.

There’s a tendency many of us share—one that is sometimes encouraged by therapeutic communities and spiritual practices—to reflect on childhood experiences and connect them to ways we experience our adult lives.

What struck me about this is that we are often encouraged to look back on negative childhood experiences to find maladaptive patterns we’ve brought into our adult lives—with the hope, of course, that untangling this tethering helps us find ways to change our behaviors and attitudes for the better.

This kind of exploration is as valid as it is commonplace. Even if we haven’t gone through it in a formal context, we’ve surely all reflected on how negative childhood experiences have manifested themselves negatively in adulthood—if not for ourselves, certainly for others. This is also a popular theme in movies, TV, and literature.

Rarely, however, do we consider the other side of the generational coin: the effect to which positive childhood experiences affect our adult lives in positive ways.

This became our theme for the day.

Not surprisingly, this counter-intuitive theme was at first hard to work with. It’s not that we didn’t have positive childhood experiences. Merely that I don’t think any of us had deeply explored how the best of our yesterdays may have contributed to the best of who we are today.

This is exactly the kind of situation where writing in a group with others makes sense. The harder a given topic is to write about, the more we benefit from the perspectives of those around us. Sure enough, a few minutes of general discussion nudged us all in concrete directions.

As usual, the writing was excellent. Once again, several people produced poignant and concise pieces based on important ideas from the past—in this case, ideas that spoke to each of us in individual ways because, it seems to me, there are so many childhood universals that exist across families of all cultures, circumstances, and generations.

It is my personal belief that many adults—and I count myself among them—seek to reconstruct the story of their lives by connecting their present sense of who they are with their memories of who they were.

For good or ill, we seem to be conditioned to connect the dots of our lives through themes of negativity. Again, I believe there is value in this.

But I wonder—and wonder now, after our class, even more—if tracing the paths of our positive experiences doesn’t lead to a more enlightened (“lighter,” “light-filled,” “light-focused”) generational view of the history of our past, the mystery of our future, and the gift that is who we are in the present.

Sometimes the work we do in Writing in Community gets a little heavy. As I experience this, it occurs to me that we often explore writing as a tool for introspection, that we often write about ourselves for ourselves.

But when we write in a community with the intention of sharing our words with others, my experience has been that we lighten up a bit and that the light we make together is more powerful than the darkness we may keep inside of us when we write alone.