Your great-grandparents’ lives now fit into a few photos and stories. Think about which stories you’d want yours to fit into.

A whole life compresses into a handful of anecdotes within a few generations. That sounds bleak and it is also clarifying, because the surviving stories are never about possessions or job titles. They are about what somebody did when it counted, who they looked after, the once they walked away from something. Compression keeps the character and drops the rest.

Ask which story about you is already true and worth keeping. Then do something this year that would be worth telling: help somebody at a cost to yourself, take the risk you keep circling. The few surviving anecdotes are being chosen now.