Life is largely about the stories we accumulate, and the memories that we gather over the years.
To a significant degree, this is the reason why we all seek out interesting, exciting, and novel experiences – at least from time to time. We like to explore more interesting dimensions of life, at least in part so that the stories that we live out become richer and more interesting, and so that we have a greater wealth of memories to look back on fondly as time passes.
Of course, a great experience and a great memory can be enriched all the more if you have good systems and methods in place to help preserve those memories, and to keep them fresh in your awareness.
So, here are some great ways to preserve those meaningful memories.
- Have a painting commissioned
Photography is, obviously, very common these days, what with just about everyone having a smartphone with a decent camera built in, usually alongside social media profiles that have a heavy photographic component.
When was the last time that you heard of someone having a portrait painting commissioned, though?
Paintings are timelessly classic decorative features, that can add a great degree of life to any home, and that can certainly draw the eye and withstand the test of time. With a painting, a particular memory is forever immortalised and kept somewhere within your line of sight.
These days, there are companies who will paint portraits for you based directly on photos you provide, and it’s still possible to find artists who will paint live portraits of you, too.
- Keep a journal
Journals can be great for a lot of different reasons, including, of course, the fact that a journal allows you to capture and preserve an insight into exactly what you are thinking or feeling at any given moment in time, as opposed to just a visual cue of the situation itself.
Keeping up a daily journal habit can, therefore, be a great way of tracking significant events in your everyday life for posterity.
You could go for a fairly in-depth approach to journalling, or you could just make bullet point highlights of what happened on a particular day. In any case, you can expect to find that this practice can significantly jog your memory and help you to piece things together, down the line.
- Go for old-fashioned photo albums
As already pointed out in this article, digital cameras are ubiquitous now, and it’s normal for people to take hundreds, if not thousands of digital photographs whenever they go away on holiday.
But digital photos, when left in a digital format, are pretty intangible. They can easily be lost, forgotten about, or otherwise overlooked.
If you print out a choice selection of your photos, though, and keep them in an old-fashioned photo album, you will not only be automatically selecting out the most striking and poignant photos, but you’ll also be putting them in a format which feels a lot more solid and tangible.
Paging through a photo album years down the line is just a much more interesting prospect than scrolling through your social media feeds.
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