At the beginning of this experiment in remembering every day that passes, I decided that I would not write things down to help me. All the memory tags had to be held in my mind and if I lost an image then I would have nothing to consult to recover it.
The counter on this blog tells me I am now 455 days in and I have not yet lost a day.
But I am now writing a diary covering the period of this experiment. Today I wrote the entry for 23 July 2012.
I tried keeping a diary as a child, but it was really at college that I began to do so seriously. I have diaries covering the decades since then. The secret I found was not to make it a daily chore, but to write in them when I felt like it. Sometimes there are daily entries; sometimes there are gaps of many months, perhaps with an attempt to recap on the lost days when I did finally pick it up again.
Recently I have felt the need to return to writing my diary and have been adding entries for each day since I began this process. The images pinned to my mental calendar are the starting point, but the actual entry is in the style I have always used. Some entries go on for pages, to paint the picture of where I was or to tell the story of something that happened. Others are much shorter.
It is very satisfying to be able to write an entry for a day 9 months ago as if writing it at the end of that day.
If I'm honest, part of my motivation is I do fear I will start losing days or at least some of the details.
My current memory refresh method of recalling a two-day window for each week since I began this process is proving reliable. But the time will come when the number of days will require a quicker refresh process, perhaps a one-day window per month in the longer term. Will the longer breaks between recalling each day be sufficient, or will I start to forget?
My diary is not there as an aid to this process of remembering every day that passes, but a record that will survive if this falls apart.
The counter on this blog tells me I am now 455 days in and I have not yet lost a day.
But I am now writing a diary covering the period of this experiment. Today I wrote the entry for 23 July 2012.
I tried keeping a diary as a child, but it was really at college that I began to do so seriously. I have diaries covering the decades since then. The secret I found was not to make it a daily chore, but to write in them when I felt like it. Sometimes there are daily entries; sometimes there are gaps of many months, perhaps with an attempt to recap on the lost days when I did finally pick it up again.
Recently I have felt the need to return to writing my diary and have been adding entries for each day since I began this process. The images pinned to my mental calendar are the starting point, but the actual entry is in the style I have always used. Some entries go on for pages, to paint the picture of where I was or to tell the story of something that happened. Others are much shorter.
It is very satisfying to be able to write an entry for a day 9 months ago as if writing it at the end of that day.
If I'm honest, part of my motivation is I do fear I will start losing days or at least some of the details.
My current memory refresh method of recalling a two-day window for each week since I began this process is proving reliable. But the time will come when the number of days will require a quicker refresh process, perhaps a one-day window per month in the longer term. Will the longer breaks between recalling each day be sufficient, or will I start to forget?
My diary is not there as an aid to this process of remembering every day that passes, but a record that will survive if this falls apart.
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