I have recently re-read a private memorandum of events that happened some time ago in my personal life. In this memo I wrote that “those two events will always stay intertwined in my memory”. Well… I didn’t take into account how quickly my memory of those events faded. If I hadn’t written them down for one, I wouldn’t even know about them any more. Both events have completely vanished from my active memory. It is not that I didn’t remember them when I read about them: the re-reading served as a refresher for my mind, the events are present again. But: I would not have been able to recall even one of them, left alone both and remember that they were intertwined without this refresher. Was it long ago? Maybe, it depends on your definition: about one and half years ago. And at that time I felt and believed that those events were pretty big in my life.

That showed me one thing very clearly: our memory is extremely faulty.

‘The horror of that moment,’ the King went on, ‘I shall never, NEVER forget!’
‘You will, though,’ the Queen said, ‘if you don’t make a memorandum of it.’

Through the looking glass, Lewis Carroll

I have learned, thus, that everything, which seems to be important to me at a given time I should write down. You might want to call it simply journaling, but that is not what I mean. Journaling as I understand it, is something you do in order to cleanse yourself from the annoyances of life. You write down what has happened during your day, both good and bad, or write down your dreams or ideas. Don’t get me wrong, though. Journaling has been proven to be extremely therapeutic, especially if you adhere to certain simple rules about what to write down and what not.

But what I suggest is more a habit of chronicling the important events in your life and how you feel about them. The purpose is not therapeutic, the purpose it historic. You want to make sure that important things don’t get forgotten. You prepare accurate memory refreshers for a time in the future when you don’t remember any of the important events of your today’s life any more. Write them down as they occur. Since later on, you will not be able to recall them correctly, or not at all.

Writing serves as an independent and rather reliable memory extension. It will help you later on to relive memories, which you did not even realize that you have forgotten.

Another conclusion of the fact that our memory is so lossy: take a lot of pictures.

Memory is very capricious of which scenes it will remember and which ones will be forgotten. Even the ones, which you think you will never forget fade away, maybe so much that you will never recall them again. Don’t loose your past. It is the most important part of your life. It is what you have lived through.

Write down and summarize a lot. Write down the facts, write down your feelings about it. If your life and your future self is valuable to you, send yourself a message from the past to the future. Be your own reporter in life. Write your life’s history.

I’m sure 10 years from now, or 20 years from now, you will be happy that you took the time to write down and document your life’s biggest events.

Take a lot of pictures. And invest the time to annotate them, make sure you write down the place, time and the people you were with.

Both writing down and taking pictures and videos serve as a memory extension and are a much more reliable storage device for the actual events, for memories in your brain tend to fade and deteriorate, to transform and to change.