11 October 2011

brain scrapbooks

If you made a pie chart of the average person's life, about 10% of the days would be good days, like really fabulous days that make you cry with joy, 10% would be bad days, like ones that make you want to cry with despair, and the rest (80% - don't worry, I got this math stuff down) would be the average days. Not good, not bad, just no particular events that could sustain a memory in your mind.
But do you really want to forget approximately 80% of your life? Probably not. I mean, we all want to remember the good things. And maybe we even want to remember the bad things so they can make us stronger. But things that don't have a significant impact on our lives do not really stay in our memories. If some kid handed you a pink post-it note and danced around in a circle, that would probably stick in your memory. But if some kid handed you a pale yellow post-it note and walked away, this event would probably escape your mind rather quickly.
But the only way to make sure you can keep the best memories possible, so that you can entertain yourself in your later years, is if you make little brain scrapbooks. I'm making one now - this blog is helping me to remember the mundane things that occur. And sometimes the best things to hear are those very things. My favorite tweets from famous people are the ones about them going to buy a sandwich, or them taking a picture of themselves in Target; things that we do everyday.
And since these daily events make up a ton of our lives, we have to recognize how important they are.
But anyways, back to scrapbooks. If you try and think of something - it could be just one thing - in your day that made you laugh, smile, cry, scream, or just something important enough that you still remember it by the end of the day, write it down. Make a little book filled with your daily adventures, boring as they may seem. Those are the very things that historians want to find when they are looking to write about the daily life of a certain culture. Little journals and writings about quotidian things.
My blog's helped me keep those "mundane" things closer to the heart. And it can also help you find a spark of inspiration or significance that you never noticed before. Sometimes the everyday things are the most interesting, because they make us look twice.

No comments:

Post a Comment