Using a brief life journal to jog your memory

It’s said that when you get old all you have left are your memories.  I’m talking about being really old here, where you’re unable to do the things you used to and are basically counting down the years months and days until it’s your time to go.  You’re kids are all grown up, and you maybe don’t see them as much, you’re friends visit less either because they can’t or they’ve already passed on. These memories that you have may be the only things that can make you smile.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this recently and have been casting my mind back to when I was in my early twenties making my way in the world.  I can remember a surprising amount of detail about certain things.  I can associate certain events with music I was listening to at the time and special occasions such as a significant birthday or holiday are of course generally easier to recall than other more trivial things.   I actually began to write this down in a text file a few years ago and have been sporadically adding to it ever since.  Every now and then when I remember something I add it in.  I now have it in a Google document and I call this my “Life Journal”.

What’s the purpose of the Life Journal?  It’s simply there to help me remember more detail.  I have found that a few short keywords from something in the past seems to really trigger something and a whole load of other memories come flooding back.  This then enables me to add a little bit more detail to a particular month, and if I come back and look at it again I will often find that this will trigger yet more lost memories. 

It’s quite a fascinating process actually.  I’ve often thought about how the human brain stores information.  The images, sounds smells, tastes and emotions if they were all to be recorded in absolute 100% perfect detail would probably need something the size of a block of flats, at least that’s what I’d imagine when you consider the way that today’s computers store information.  The human brain seems to be an extremely sophisticated device, however, and I believe that it has the ability to reconstruct memories from a pointers, perhaps these are simply other memories.  The detail often isn’t all there but there’s a sense of knowing what happened, and as I’ve said this often triggers a chain reaction to other memories and so on.  I think being able to associate dates with events helps the process slightly.  This is basically the format I use for my Life Journal at the moment - fictitious data of course:

1991	Jan	New year in Scotland, moved to upstairs flat after the flood
	Feb-Mar	Started work at Smiths Company, Moved to High St., Jane gave birth to James, went to Karl’s leaving do with Phil, Training course in Chesham
	Dec	Met girl from Leeds at petrol station whilst waiting on tow truck, Paul’s wedding, Dave moved in on the 19th, Went to see Bon Jovi at Hammersmith
1992	Jan	Bought bicycle from shop in North St., received unexpected pay rise, was introduced to Billy and Kate

Well you kind of get the idea.  You can put as much or as little detail down as you like and include as much date information as you can. It’s often not always possible to get an exact date, such as 21st April 1991.  But if you know you rebuilt that bike engine between March and April 1991 that’s good enough for now, it may be the case that some more detail will come along later and you can update it.  It seems to be the natural way of things to have a lot of detail for some months and some years or months will have hardly anything.  However, these gradually fill up.

I’ve also discovered that certain big events such as going to a concert or movie being released can help you fill in the dates, and of course the dates help you add more detail!  Moving forward, I plan to introduce photos and possibly even video clips into the timeline on my Life Journal.  I’ll have photos that I took a few years back and can perhaps source some from friends.  Obviously video footage is going to be more recent, but all in all I think these will help me in years to come remember my life in more detail than I otherwise would.

On the subject of memories.  I saw a film a while back called The Final Cut which was rather intriguing.  It was set some time in the future and they had the technology to insert a chip into a person at birth that would record everything that happened to them.  The title of the film stems from the fact that a person would take these recordings and with some artistic flair create a kind of visual eulogy for the family of the recently deceased to enjoy (or not).  This movie had a bit of murder and mystery in there as well, but the idea of the personal life record was what I found most interesting.  So there you go, why not start a Life Journal and see what you can remember about your past.

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