Monday, December 31, 2007

“I've a grand memory for forgetting.” Robert Louis Stevenson

Things are forgotten and misremembered. Some people keep diaries to help them remember the succession of events. The problem that I have eternally is I remember the big items but all the small stories of my life get thrown into a big junk drawer of my history. I saw a site that attempts to start getting all this a bit straight. DandeLife is devoted to pulling all the online strings of your life together. If you are blogging, videoing, and part of social networks it tries to put all those into some sort of order. However this is not why I am excited by this site. I have no real interest in being that organized but memory is a tricky thing. One event leads to another and I cannot seem to untangle the Gordian Knot of what came first. It would be so much easier if I had a timeline. Seems so simple, just a matter of ,lets say once a month, putting down some of the months important events on this easy to use timeline. You can add a one line description or on another page fill it with a real description. Just think of a page that contains a small list of the important stuff, or at least the important at that moment stuff. At anytime you could go back and review events that led to some major crisis or superior epiphany. Now this is all cool and neat-o but why would you want to do this? Well New Years Eve got me thinking of well meaning and well forgotten resolutions. For some people this might be the extra bit that helps them keep it all going or maybe they rediscover this in April and see what they said they would be doing in the future. There is an old school method that is similar to this that my wife reminded me of recently. The practice of writing yourself a letter to be mailed by a friend at some future date. This holiday you may want to give one of these a try because who knows what you will have to say in the future.

No comments:

Post a Comment