Defining moments

Yesterday I took part in a workshop on memoir writing. There were about a dozen of us with a leader who set several exercises that obliged us to think and reflect critically on what we were doing, how we were doing it, and encouraged us in various ways. For instance one way to construct a memoir would be around a setting like a family home. We focused on defining moments or events that shaped the subsequent course of our lives. I had no trouble with this, was pleased when the workshop took this direction because this is how I have structured the memoirs that I first began to write about 20 years ago. In the opening chapters about my early childhood the setting into which I was born and spent my early formative years, I have described how I believe that setting and the events of that time contributed to my emotional makeup. In later chapters it's easy to identify defining moments that shaped the course of my life from that time on. However, on further reflection, I think only one could truly be called a 'moment' - the others were decision nodes, times when I faced a fork in the road of life and had to choose whether to go one way or the other. Several of these were like Robert Frost's famous poem about two roads that diverged, and taking the road less traveled by, "... and that has made all the difference." This has assuredly been my experience.  There was one precisely defined moment when I stopped to pick up a pair of hitchhikers, and a little over two years later was married to one of them who shared with me in all the subsequent defining moments, or rather in all the decision nodes.On a few occasions, a moment of truth led inexorably to a decision node, but after Wendy came into my life the decision was always a shared one, and came at the end of a build up of circumstances and events which forewarned us of a decision that we would soon have to make. So yesterday's memoir-writing workshop was reassuring about the structure of the memoirs I've been assembling; and yesterday as I was reading a few excerpts aloud to the dozen or so memoir writers in attendance, I spotted ways in which I must revise them to make them more readable and interesting. There is no doubt that it was an extremely well spent day.