A few weeks ago I had lunch with Lin-Manuel Miranda, the writer of the Broadway play Hamilton.  You can imagine his surprise when I admitted to him I had not yet heard the Soundtrack from his play Hamilton but I shared how big a fan of it my husband is and how excited I was to go to the play myself.  Lin-Manuel teasingly gave me a hard time, pointing out that I may be one of the few people in the world who have not actually listened to it yet and how for a mere $9.99 I could actually download the soundtrack from itunes right then to listen to it.  I explained that my husband didn’t want me to listen to the soundtrack until I could take the time to listen to it start to finish to hear the entire soundtrack, and given my crazy schedule I hadn’t been able to yet – then I teasingly joked that if I were to be given tickets to the play I would be able to hear it sung live 🙂

Lin-Manuel Miranda and Amy Rees Anderson

Amy Rees Anderson at lunch with Lin-Manuel Miranda

Well tonight I was finally able to hear the soundtrack live as my husband and I went to see Hamilton which is playing in Salt Lake City right now.  I could go on and on about it but instead I wanted to share just one of the messages from the play that was in a song sang by the character playing George Washington:

“History Has Its Eyes On You”     

When we go about our lives we often don’t consider that what we are doing right now will become history later and that history will impact and/or affect countless lives down the road who were watching our examples.  We never know who is watching our example, the young the old, and those still to be born… What will they learn from our history?

Do we pay attention to the history we are creating with our lives? Do we think about that as we post messages and photos and videos on social media? Are we being mindful to make sure our future posterity will be proud of our history?  All good questions to think about!  And I love the message of the song “My Shot” which reminds us that we shouldn’t throw away this shot we’ve been given to do something incredible with our lives.

Gosh, there were so many other lessons from the history of Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and others… Thanks to Lin-Manuel for sharing his talent with all of us!  Great show!

History has it’s eyes on us so let’s not throw away our shot!

~Amy Rees Anderson