“My yesterdays are disappearing, and my tomorrows are uncertain, so what do I live for? I live for each day. I live in the moment. Some tomorrow soon, I’ll forget that I stood before you and gave this speech. But just because I’ll forget it some tomorrow doesn’t mean that I didn’t live every second of it today. I will forget today, but that doesn’t mean that today didn’t matter.” ~ Still Alice by Lisa Genova
Our memories matter, because we are the stories we tell ourselves.
Unlike functional computer that will faithfully retrieve memories (from the hard drives) as the computer memories are, human memories are fundamentally impermanent, and filtered with our emotions every time we recall a particular memory.
Thus, we desire to create meaningful memories that make us feel grateful, inspired or happy – I term this remembered happiness. Later I discovered that this resonate with the idea of the remembering-self, described by Daniel Kahneman.
A way to create meaningful memories is to make use of tangible visuals, they evoke what Marcel Proust deemed as conscious memories or memoire volontaire in French. Herein, visuals refer to photographs, drawings, paintings, doodles and videos / movies.
Visuals help us to focus our attention, to associate emotional significance to our particular life experiences, to review and to elaborate them. All these attention, emotional significance, review and elaboration are required to push the recent memory space into longer-term storage, else it would be quickly and naturally discarded with the passage of time.
Visuals can also be easily digitized and stored, hence minimizing the unnecessary clutters of our lives. According to Thorin Klosowski, most things we own have been useless; however some, if not many things are associated with our memories, such as souvenirs we bought while travelling overseas, gifts from the loved ones, ticket stubs from the first dates. By creating visuals out of these things, we can easily live a minimalist, tranquil and creative life.
I believe in reducing what we do not or no longer need. That’s how human body function biologically. We eat, absorb nutrients and excrete the unwanted. Only through such subtractions, we can perform additions of meaningful things (experience, exposure, education and memories) into our lives.
Planning ahead of what kind of memories you want to create is important. I always tell myself, no matter what my experience of visiting a place or meeting particular people turn out to be, I am going to enjoy it.
Planning includes doing research.
For example, when I am going to visit a foreign country, I will review my connection capital for re-connecting with people whom I want to meet and learn from, check wikitravel for short-listing places that I must see, google images to confirm what others have recommended, and TripAdvisor for more descriptions.
If I have more time, I will appreciate professionally / creatively taken photographs or simple photographs taken by my friends / acquaintances (National Geographic, DeviantART, Flickr, Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook, etc). I keep references of visuals that inspire me; remember that references are one of the essences of research. I am grateful for all these inspirations from others.
Planning enables us to prepare for props, to decide on the best timing to visit particular destinations and to prioritize what we love most.
Involve other people in your planning. When every family member, including a toddler, is involved in the planning, you are more likely to experience moments worth of memory.
Embrace novelty as we tend to remember the first things in lour ives. The first flight, the first overseas trip, the first picnic, the first date, the graduations, all are special to us.
Be wise when you seek out novelty so that the novelty will not become a routine. To quote Ben Casnocha, “Non-stop travellers no longer see a new hotel or city as new. Meeting new people from different backgrounds becomes a chore instead of an exciting quest to understand the variety of human nature.”
People make our lives meaningful. You may have visited a place or savoured a delicious dish, but not with that someone. You can have new memories with new people doing old things or visiting old places.
For example, I have been to London in spring, summer, and winter, on different memorable occasions. However, in summer 2015, realizing how much Little Prince loves double decker buses, I agreed to bring him to London in few years down the road. It will be our memorable trip, conceived when he was merely a toddler. I hope he would never forget his toddler dream as days pass and time flies.
We can utilize the art of post-processing. If you have not acquired the luxury of time and the expert skills like of professionals (e.g. photoshop*), they are many easy-to-use post-processing tools. As of summer 2015, I am grateful for enjoying darktable, pixlr, cymera, instagram, instagrid, instamag, latergram, gimp, photofunia. *Perhaps, one day I will post-process some of my previously taken photographs using photoshop for those high-resolution, high-quality and highly meaningful ones.
Imagine you are visiting a famous tourist attraction, and it was too crowded or nobody to help you to take a photograph of you and the attraction. A solution is to make a collage using (i) image(s) of you / parts of you e.g. hands, feet, incomplete face, your soft toys; (ii) the attraction at its most glorious angles. I personally find that The Art of Collage makes me happier and have less expectations on factors that are beyond my controls.
Although pictures speak a thousand of words, some words touch our souls and nurture our minds. Use quotes from the inspiring alive, the eminent dead or yourself. A simple phrase can also assist our memories greatly; I label some of the places with one / some of the followings: the dates, the names (in different languages if necessary), the emotions and the story behind the image. For some personally meaningful visuals, I also include poems or my prayers, e.g. through the use of collage in which a panel is for an image and another panel is for the prayer text.
Never 100% believe the visuals presented by others because professionals do post-processing. Think of cosmetics advertisements featuring beautiful women with flawless skin. The truth is they have imperfection too, but post-processing alter perspectives of the viewers.
In a nutshell, to create meaningful memories using visuals we can easily
- plan ahead
- do research
- embrace novelty wisely
- do post-processing either individually or in batch
- use collages
- use quotes / labels
With love,
20150621
project36524 