What will your Legacy be?

Do you have a legacy you’d like to leave to your children?

Waide and Sophie, Video Producers on Sea Princess

For instance, how would you like to be remembered?

What life lessons do you think you’ve passed on to your children?

Life Stories

If our life stories are our legacy then what would you like to pass on to future generations of your family?

On board the Sea Princess lovely Sophie (from Brighton, UK) and Waide (from Durban, South Africa) offer a service in which they interview, film, and then edit personalized documentary videos that are designed to help us preserve our life stories.

“We’re hoping to bring families closer through cinematic storytelling,” Sophie told me.

I was bowled over by the idea of it.

What a beautiful way to preserve precious memories and hand them down to future generations. I mean, do you really know what your parents thought and felt about each other? Do you have any idea about how they met, or how they felt when you were born, what you really meant to them as a child, or how they think they fared as parents raising you? Wouldn’t it be lovely to know?

Legacy Videos

Anyway, Dave and I were invited to a legacy video session with Waide and Sophie, two talented Video Producers on Sea Princess, and we were taken back to reliving and thinking about some of the special moments in our lives. Like the moment we first laid eyes on each other, what it felt like to fall in love, and we also had the chance to tell our loved ones on camera what they really mean to us.

Screen Shot Pic Credits: Sophie and Waide, Video Producers on Sea Princess

Dave was asked, “What life lesson would you like to pass on to your children?” and he said, “If you want something enough and you work hard then good things will come.”

I was asked what advice would I have for our children, and I said: “Be good, be kind, follow your dreams and in any situation or relationship just give give give and give some more, and you’ll find the universe magically starts giving back.”

Insightful Questions

Sophie asked us some more innocently phrased but deeply leading questions which made us think about parts of our lives we really hadn’t thought about for years and years.

• How did we meet?
• What was it like growing up – what were things like in our childhoods?
• How did we feel when we first set eyes on each other?
• What attracted us to each other?
• What did we like so much about each other that we wanted to be with with each other forever?
• How did we feel when we held our first child in our arms for the very first time?
• If we could tell our children anything, what would it be?
• How did we think we’d fared as parents?

Well, let me tell you there were tears and there was laughter as we re-discovered parts of ourselves and thoughts which we’d buried for years.

The Emotional Truths

Like Dave only buying his suit on the morning of our wedding, like our dog Clyde knowing I was pregnant before we did, like how it felt moving to the Himalayas when Sam was just 5 weeks old, like how we met in a downtown Bangkok hotel in 1983, like how much our children mean to us and the life lessons we hope we’ve passed on.

My heart, my eyes and my throat seized up when Dave said I was his soul mate, I cried when I relived how it felt to hold my babies for the first time, and when Dave broke down in tears talking about what it meant to be a father, well I almost completely fell apart too.

It’s funny how you go through life and sort of skirt the serious stuff, forget the things that have held you together, discount the glue that binds you, until you are asked a leading question by someone else and you’re encouraged to re-visit private places that mean so much to you but which you never really think about during day to day life.

If you’re on a Princess Cruise, perhaps you’ll have the chance to compile your own Legacy, if not, why not compile your own at home?

So Lifestylers, please tell us in the comments – what would YOU like to be remembered for?