Recording for Posterity
Earlier this week I went looking for a small bit of information I wrote down nearly ten years ago. I knew I had recorded it sometime in my journal, but now that I have been journaling for fifteen years, I wasn't quite sure where I might find it.
As I skimmed through my drawer full of journals, it seemed strange that there were so many events I did not even vaguely recognize. If it were not for the fact that the incidence was sandwiched between events I did remember, and summarized in my less than model handwriting, I might have thought some other person's journal had gotten mixed in with mine.
I always suspected that when I chronicled an event it was so a future me would be able to remember the details where only a shadow of a memory existed. Of course, for a time I thought I journaled so one hundred years later a distant relation would know what it had been like to be me, but that was before I realized that even a distant relation might be too close.
But now, ten years later, I find I have trouble knowing what it had been like to be me.
If I had known, way back when, how my memories would have slipped away unnoticed, I might have spent more energy cataloging every thought, event, and feeling. But then, of course, it would have taken me much, much longer to find the little detail I did remember carefully recording.
As I skimmed through my drawer full of journals, it seemed strange that there were so many events I did not even vaguely recognize. If it were not for the fact that the incidence was sandwiched between events I did remember, and summarized in my less than model handwriting, I might have thought some other person's journal had gotten mixed in with mine.
I always suspected that when I chronicled an event it was so a future me would be able to remember the details where only a shadow of a memory existed. Of course, for a time I thought I journaled so one hundred years later a distant relation would know what it had been like to be me, but that was before I realized that even a distant relation might be too close.
But now, ten years later, I find I have trouble knowing what it had been like to be me.
If I had known, way back when, how my memories would have slipped away unnoticed, I might have spent more energy cataloging every thought, event, and feeling. But then, of course, it would have taken me much, much longer to find the little detail I did remember carefully recording.
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