As we age, we collect more and more memories and experiences. How do you preserve the past for the future?
In theory, if you kept the proper documentation you would be able to recreate your life. Ticket stubs from concerts you attended, holiday and birthday cards from friends and family, credit card bills would show what you bought and when, and of course pictures of all the highlights.
Naturally, you probably don’t keep all that stuff. If you preserved everything, you’d pretty soon drown in it all. So probably bills get thrown out after keeping for a predetermined length of time. Cards are displayed for a short while and then recycled. And so on.
But how do you determine what to keep? What makes the cut, and what gets tossed like so much junk?
There is an additional issue to consider for those things you decide to retain. How do you store them, preserve them, organize them, and display them? If you keep, for example, pictures of vacations, do you have albums for each one? Do you keep digital copies only, or do you have physical prints made? How often do you look at them yourself, or show them to other people?
A neat keepsake would be a collage of a hobby you have, like playbills from all the theater productions attended, or bibs from races you’ve run. That could be a way to display them, but to do so requires that you save them until you have enough to gather together.
And what about less fun stuff, like tax returns or bills or receipts. How to you store them until it is safe to dispose of them? What about important documents like a passport, a marriage license, or birth certificate?
Deciding what to keep and how to keep it takes time, organization, and money. How do you manage it?
Related questions: Keep or toss? What material possession means the most to you? How much does your past determine your future? Do you keep a journal?
This is a strange question for me today as yesterday, I opened a chest that held about half the things I’ve been saving for the sake of memory. I threw away or recycled roughly half of it and expect to discard more once I’ve had a chance to read through the letters and newspaper clippings. Most of what I’ve kept wouldn’t interest anyone but me—and even that feels uncertain. So, as time allows, I’ll likely continue letting it go.
I don’t want to burden a friend or family member with the task and pressure of contemplating, What was the point of keeping all this?
If I truly want to preserve my past—my outlook on life, the joys and struggles I’ve faced—mementos alone won’t do it. Physical objects can’t carry meaning on their own. An award, for instance, can’t convey what running meant to me.
More likely, I’ll write a long letter—something that speaks directly to parts of my life and the beliefs that shaped it. I suspect I could capture who I was far better in prose than in a box of trinkets and a hard drive of scanned photographs.