Starting over

 It has been a while since I have posted on this blog about remembering every day that passes.

As I have described in previous posts, the system of reviewing the memory tags pinned to my mental calendar became unsustainable after about ten years. It became harder to refresh the images.

Perhaps if I was more adept at standard memorising techniques, of the sort that enable people to memorise sequences of playing cards or the digits if pi, I would have been able to keep going indefinitely.

However, I found as I passed over days where the images did not come easily to mind, I became increasingly demoralised and reluctant to try. Efforts to recapture the images by retrospectively filling diaries or filling phone apps with photos I had taken did not provide a solution.

And so I had to admit that, for me, my limit was ten years.

But I had gained so much from this process, I decided I would simply start again.

I took that decision on 01 June 2023. 

Following the same processes I have developed and described in this blog, I have been adding an image to each day since then as a memory tag. I refresh them in the same way as before. The numbers are manageable. All being equal, I should be able to keep this up for a total of ten years.

At the start of each month, I do range back over my mental calendar, starting in 2012, the first full year in this process. Those images are well entrenched and I can bring most of them back when I try. In the intervening years, I can at least orientate myself by significant periods or events, even if the images for many days have faded from my mental eye. 

It is more recent years where the blanks predominate, as the reviewing process buckled under its own weight. At least until 01 June 2023. Then I am back with fully populated calendars.

A week at a time

 In my ten-year update on this process of remembering every day that passes, I described the recall procedure I used to refresh the images pinned to my mental calendar as memory tags.

I changed approach in July.

I now aim to recall a week from each of the past ten years, encompassing the current date.

I have learned that dates 10 years ago are two days later. In other words, today is Monday, 19 September 2022, so I begin by looking back to the week of Monday, 17 September 2012 and run through the images for every day of that week.

The pattern as I move on a year, is the date decreases by one, so:

Monday, 16 September 2013

Monday, 15 September 2014

Monday, 14 September 2015

Then drop two days for the leap year, so Monday, 12 September 2016, but as this doesn't include the present date, I move on a week.

Monday 19 September 2016 (the same date as today, making a quick reference point).

Monday 18 September 2017

Monday 17 September 2018

Monday 16 September 2019

Another leap year.

Monday 14 September 2020

Monday 13 September 2021

Which brings me to last week, Monday 12 September 2022.

The beauty of this system is I review these seven-day windows seven times, so have time to search around for any missing images. I also have a longer context to help me remember what was going on in my life.

It is also generally possible to complete these historic reviews before I get up. 

This gives me sufficient time to complete a current review of the past month and a selection of days from the past 6 months or so (I currently go back to January considering a two or three-day window).

The great disadvantage is I'm not reviewing other images from the past ten years and I won't return to these images until next September.

That's an enormous gap.

Previously, I found that I really needed to refresh images once per month for them to be easy to recall. But there are now too many and I was overwhelmed. I have tried to come up with some method to bring in other days to a daily routine, but nothing has worked so far.

The good news is that I am generally able to recall most or many images for the more distant years, having refreshed them so many times. I struggle with the recent years of 2020 and 2021, particularly as much of this time was constrained by lockdowns and I might have only captured a detail such as an old friend I called up, a film I watched, or an online course I completed. Events were simply less memorable.

However, I don't know how long the more established images will last if I'm only recalling them during one week per year, instead of once per month, as at the outset.

I don't want to admit defeat and let them go, but gaps are appearing. I sometimes resort to looking back through photos as a reminder and have even considered digging out the diaries I wrote retrospectively several years into this process.

As I've mentioned, I now make a daily entry in a diary with a memory tag at the top of the page. I do sometimes have to look back through the current diary as it is always the recent tags that have been most elusive, until they have been sufficiently reinforced. Given the difficulties I have with 2020 and 2021, I am trying harder to embed this year.

I had hoped this process would trigger hyperthymesia, the ability a very small number of people have to remember every day without memory tricks. It hasn't, so I need the tricks.

Routinely recalling where I was and what I was doing in past years continues to be immensely satisfying for all the reasons I've addressed before. And being able to recall events is also very impressive to many friends and relatives who struggle to place them.

Ten years of remembering every day that passes

I began this process on 17 December 2011 and let the tenth anniversary pass without comment, so the time has come to reflect.

Firstly, I continue with this process. Every day I record a memory tag on my mental calendar and regularly review past days.

My current review process is to go through a month at a time per year. I'm currently on the month of September, remembering consecutive days of each month from 2012. It continues to be enriching. I would not have thought of many or even most of the events covered, but for this process. Indeed, I rarely recall events from the years prior to 2012 and have few landmarks for them.

The passage of time continues to surprise me. The moments captured in my images are fresh, but my perspective on them changes. Remembering every day gives me appreciation of how much happens in a year, yet I also feel the relentlessness of time's passing.

I have no intention to stop, but it has inevitably become harder to refresh the memory tags on my mental calendar. When this was easiest, I was recalling each image at least once per month. With approaching 4000 images, I need to get through 3 months per day. That rarely happens as my discipline has waned and I've let things slide when I've struggled to remember tags. Other times, an image may distract me to recall other events of the day or associated days.

Over the years, my review process has adapted as the days have piled up. My current approach to cope is not to obsess if tags elude me, but to go through what I can in the hope that missing tags will appear next time around. It is often the case that recalling subsequent months or years will suddenly unlock other tags. They are still there.

For many years, I wrote nothing down, though sometimes I might have to look back through photos or other records to find out what I was doing on a particular day where the memory tag alluded more. Prior to this process, I kept a diary and a few years ago I caught up with it, writing entries from years before retrospectively based on my memory tags.

More recently, I've kept a diary as I go, recording significant events and identifying the memory tag at the top of the page. This is not a substitute for my mental calendar, but it helps me to reinforce the memory tags during the early weeks.

It's always been the case that most recent tags are most elusive because I have spent less time reinforcing them. I've learned that I need to regularly refresh the tags by calling them to mind. What worked best was running through every day of the past month and a couple of days per month of the preceding 6 months, then selected periods of earlier years.

Often these days, I don't even complete the daily review of even the last month and so have to resort to the diary to fill in blanks. Occasionally, I'll look further back, but generally the diary is for these more recent days.

Another pressure on my time to remember is I'm using my brain for other purposes. My New Year's Resolution in 2019 was to learn the piano. Key to success is building mental representations of music and the keyboard. Increasingly, I do this by playing pieces on my mental piano, which now competes with my mental calendar for my attention.

But I'm not giving up. I am increasingly grateful for memories of times that have gone and the people who are no longer with us. 

Relatives and friends who have passed away. 

My mother's decline into Alzheimer's, which has wiped us from her memory. And put her into a care home when she became terrified of the strangers keeping her in a strange house. 

For a while she believed the care home was her childhood home and she had just come in for a rest from helping her father in the garden. Now those memories appear to have gone too, and though she is friendly when we visit, barely communicates. She smiles at us, but for the warmth of human contact, not recognition.

This shows me the fragility of our brains, that our memories are essential for our relationships, but that we are also more than our memories. Aspects of our personalities reside at a deeper level.

Sometimes, I wonder if there is something to be gained from letting these days go. It is normal to forget. 

Yet, I can see no advantage. The great benefit of this process, even as I struggle with it, is it gives me a rounded view of my life. 

The few memories I have from the years before sometimes taunt me with my failings and are missing the perspective given by putting isolated incidents into their surrounding context. 

So, I will continue to remember every day that passes, as best I can, and continue to be amazed by what it is to live a life.

To those giving this a try

It's great to see comments from people who have been inspired by this blog to try their own experiment in remembering every day that passes. 

People sometimes suggest different approaches - everyone has to find what works for them, which will probably change over time as the days pile up.

I have just replied to a recent comment as follows:

Thank you for your comment. Please keep us updated on how your approach works.

When I began - nearly 10 years ago now - I had the hope that this process might develop hyperthymesia, the ability a very small number of people have to remember every day without memory tricks.

That hasn't happened, but I continue. It is still rewarding - if not more so with the memory tags that have been reinforced stretching back 10 years.

Though it takes some time to do the reviews, it is only a small fraction of my day and I am certain it is beneficial to my mental health to think about this wide range of experiences, not just those that come to my mind unbidden.

Writing things down

For a long time while following the process of remembering every day that passes, I had a policy of not keeping a diary and not making notes. I thought it would be good for my discipline to rely on my memory alone. 

True, I would sometimes have to look through photos on my phone or emails with travel details to help me recover the images for particular days if I got stuck, but generally the mental process alone worked.

Prior to starting this journey, I had been a good journal keeper, not writing every day, but filling in the gaps whenever I picked it up. A few years in, I wrote my missing journals retrospectively, using the recollections my memory tags gave me.

Then in 2017, when my mother's Alzheimer's progressed to the point where I returned home to help my father and sister care for her, until that was no longer possible at home, I began to keep a diary of what was happening. The purpose was to learn what did and did not work in responding to her fears when she did not know us - and did not believe that she had a husband and children - and was scared of strangers in her house.

I have kept that going and write at the top of each page a prompt for the image for my memory tag.

This has had a downside. This year, I have fallen out of the habit of reinforcing the tags for the recent month with a review morning and night, and selected days from the past 6 months. I've told myself I can pick up my diary and catch up. To some extent that has worked, but it is not as effective as when I stuck to my routine.

It means it is somewhat harder to recall every day of recent months than the days from 2012, my first full year of this process. Yet, I suspect without the diaries, I would be lost by now.

Forgetting remembering

 I continue with this process of remembering every day that passes. I am coming up to ten years now.

However, it is getting harder to get through the review process and sometimes hitting blanks demotivates me from trying. But then, I'll have a good run or a particular day will be very important to me for the memories it brings or the fresh associations that arise.

Something I have noticed is that I no longer have the memory of my last run through to help me. For a long, long time, whenever I ran through the images pinned to my mental calendar as memory tags for each day, I would have a sense of when I last did so. If there was a day that gave me a problem, I may well recall how I recovered the tag the previous time.

Now, my process is not so routine. I don't even have a clear idea of how long it takes me to go through the tags for the past 10 years now. At present, I am going through January to December for each year, but stepping back a year each time. I'm currently mid-way through 2018, which was a important year for me as it was when my mother's Alzheimer's reached a critical stage where she no longer felt safe at home because she did not know who we were and was scared of her husband and me being in her house.

In the sessions before this, I ran through the same month of each year. In doing so, I found it was the more recent years that gave me most problems, hence giving those more attention now.

Getting through the years

 I completed a full review of my mental calendar from 17 December 2011 in December, taking a month and reviewing the images pinned to each day as memory tags for subsequent years. This brought me up to date.

There were blanks, some of which I was able to complete as subsequent years or months triggered associations. The earliest years were the easiest to complete as I have reviewed them so many times already.

January has just finished and I completed as far as the end of October. Accordingly, I've started February by running through November, December and January tags. I have 12 x 9 years = 108 months to cover, so need to cover about 4 months per day.

I will keep to the three-month window. It will have advantages as I was finding when I picked up on each month that I might have to scan the preceding month to orientate myself.

I changed the review of the past 12 months in January to make it more manageable. I had been reviewing two days per week for the whole year. Moving this window on a day at a time, so there would be overlap. To save time, I did 6 months at a time, dispensing with the overlap. So one day, Monday and Tuesday for January to June, the next Tuesday and Wednesday for July to December, then Wednesday and Thursday for January to June, etc. This half the time.

Again, it is the more recent days that are harder to track down, but I now keep a diary and note the memory tags at the top of the page, so can flip through that to remind myself. This is a practice I'm following only for the last month or so of images, as after that they are generally entrenched enough. It's a crutch, but now necessary and does not negate from the benefits I gain from the mental reviews of every day of the past 9 years.

Back to the old ways

I was close to giving up on this process of remembering every day that passes as the images pinned to my mental calendar as memory tags became increasingly elusive. Then ditching my smartphone from my bedroom and spending my initial waking time meditating and on a review, I found the images coming back to me. 

This has continued as I have reverted to some of the review techniques I used in the past. So, for the review of the past year, I am passing a two-day window over each week since January. Today being Tuesday, I’ve reviewed each Tuesday and Wednesday. It has proved to be refreshingly quick, though around October I have to switch to a review of sequential days as the images are not yet well enough entrenched. 

For the review of the 9 years since I began this process, I’ve been aiming to cover the same months of consecutive years, covering a month in two days. This is proving illuminating in a way I had forgotten.

For example, running through April from 2012 to 2020 includes my wedding anniversary. Recalling where we were in consecutive years gives me a flavour of that year in a way I was missing with the reviews of consecutive days I had been using prior to this, when it took days or weeks to cover one year as I became increasingly lost and demotivated. 

Now, I can manage four or five years of the same month before I’ve had enough. Some months have had blanks on the first run through, but subsequent years have often reminded me of events and images. My meditation process also seems to help in unlocking he images.

I'm hopeful that I can complete the review of the whole 9 years in a month of these early morning reviews.

It has all come back to me

I have ditched my smartphone from my wake-up routine and reverted to doing a morning run through of the images pinned to my mental calendar as memory tags. This review had become increasingly perfunctory as I became distracted by doing a quick check for messages, news and, sad to say, bank balances. The more perfunctory, the harder to recall the images and less motivated I was to keep trying. It seemed it was slipping away from me and the memory tags were vanishing forever.

Somewhat amazingly they have all - just about - come back to me.

My life is so much better leaving checking my smartphone for later in the day. Well, later in the morning, after I've completed the run through.

I don't just do the run through now, I spend a few minutes after waking getting into a meditative state. This is something I've done on and off for years. I'll explain it on the next post.

From that state, I've resumed the run through my mental calendar. Since reverting to this process at the beginning of the month, I've gone through each year in reverse order, so 2019, 2018 and so on to 2011/2012 (I began this process on 17 December 2011).

I've aimed to cover at least two months per session of about 20 minutes. This is slower than it used to take me when things were more manageable years ago, but now I have to do a certain amount of fishing around. 

What has generally happened is I've found an image and then had a good run of remembering other images, but then hit blanks. 

I am definitely remembering the images, rather than having a memory of the specific days (which was a trap I'd fallen into: trying to recall the images by working out where I was and what I was doing). The images do unlock other memories, but the images are key.

If there's a blank, I'll jump over it. As I come to the end of the session, having covered two or three months, my mental calendar has been speckled with more and more blanks. However, the next day I've started with any month with blanks and my subconscious has the images ready to serve up. It has been quite startling sometimes to suddenly find one image and then the others cascade across the days, sometimes triggering memories that fill in isolated blanks in earlier months.

So, in the end, I have very few days where the images have not come back to me and I feel confident that continuing with this more disciplined morning routine will bring those images back to me too.

I will be remembering every day that passes.

I also have to fit in the reviews of the past month and year, to keep my calendar updated. 

As was often the case, it is the more recent past which often presents difficulties, because the images are not yet entrenched on my mental calendar, particularly for the most recent days and weeks. I tend to do the previous month or two-month review once I'm up, perhaps on a run, and again before going to sleep. Then at odd moments during the day, I'll do the 6 month review I've written about previously, generally half a week at a time, so Monday to Thursday, say, then once I've covered the 6 months, Thursday to Sunday.

Having completed the review back to 2011, rather than just cycling round again, I've embarked on monthly windows across all years. I started this today by recalling the images for every day of the months of January 2012, 2013, 2014 and 2015. Tomorrow I aim to cover January for the remaining years.

Clearly, this is a time investment, but it is time that was eaten up by my mobile phone (which still grabs me after I've finished this process, but I'm already ahead).

Most positively, from a mental health and general balance perspective, I am viewing a wide range of aspects of my life and reflecting on the many people and events that feature in these memory tags, rather than just specific memories I would otherwise obsess about. I've written before about how enriching this is. It's good to have it back.

This doesn't cover my how life, though I will sometimes be distracted by earlier memories triggered by the review process. All the same, it is now nearly 9 years. So much has happened in that time. I am so glad to be able to remember at least one thing for every day of it.

Smartphones can be bad for your memory

Two news reports caught my attention recently and have indirectly put new life into this process of remembering every day that passes.

One said that giving attention to screens, particularly multiple screens – or "media multi-tasking" (such as scrolling through your phone while watching television) – is bad for the memory.

Another said that a large percentage of people check their smartphones within 5 minutes of waking up and the majority within the first hour.

I had fallen into this habit, partly because time differences might mean a request for me to take freelance work arrives in the early morning and waiting until usual working hours would be too late to secure the contract.

But I've gone beyond checking for such emails to routinely checking through social media and news websites, bank account apps, etc. and then starting the cycle again.

At the same time, my ability to recall the images pinned to my mental calendar as memory tags for each day has been failing me. I keep running through the current year, not least so I have some sense of the passage of time during the coronavirus lockdown and restrictions. 

I have also been refreshing past years, but this now takes so long it can be months before I revisit images to refresh them. And I know that I can run into difficulties if I delay for a month. The harder it is, the longer it takes and the more demotivated I've been to return to the process.

More distant years, such as 2012 and 2013 have been easier to review, but more recent years have been refreshed over a shorter time period and I could scan through several weeks with little clue of the images I had selected for each day. 

When I did find something to orientate me, I'd use that to try to guess at surrounding images to trigger a memory, with little success.

Then a few days ago it struck me that this was not how it used to work. I remembered the tags and they opened up the day to me and reminded me of the surrounding tags. When I had fewer days to remember and called up the images more frequently, I could often remember remembering them the last time around. Sometimes I'd have introduced a stronger connection between consecutive days to help me with the recall.

So, I decided to go back to a meditation routine I used to do morning and night, descending a mental staircase to a special place where I was totally relaxed and could then let my thoughts wander. I got into this meditative state and then returned to my mental calendar - hosting it in a particular place in this special place I was visualising. Where there were blanks, I visualised polishing the square on my mental calendar to reveal the image.

And it has been working.

I've coupled this with ditching the smartphone scanning in the morning - other than a quick check for work requests - and using my first half hour in bed after waking to engage in this review. I have the target of completing at least two months of historic images per morning (in addition to refreshing the current year during the day and when I am going to sleep).

Images are not only coming back to me, I'm suddenly remembering images that I had lost for other years and am jumping across the calendar pages to run over those days.

So I'm optimistic that I can get back into this routine and it will hopefully become easier as the images are reinforced once more.

Keeping away from my phone for this half hour and filling my mind with the richness that comes from recalling past days, with all the thoughts and reflections they trigger, can only be for the good.

Now I know what this is all about

I began this process of remembering every day that passes over 3000 days ago.

I continue to pin an image to my mental calendar at the end of every day as a memory tag.

But as I've been recording here, it has become increasingly harder to refresh the images.

Several times I've thought of giving it up as an experiment that has reached its natural end.

But I haven't. During the current coronavirus pandemic lockdown, the memory tags mean I can distinguish between days with few distinguishing features and mark the passage of time. Otherwise they would just be a blur.

More importantly, I've now realised what this process is all about.

I had hoped it would induce hyperthymesia, a rare ability to access all memories as if they are fresh. That hasn't happened. It seems that I need to review the images pinned to my mental calendar once per month to be able to remember them easily next time around. It's a memory exercise. It hasn't rewired my brain to make recall effortless.

Now there are too many days to run through all the images on that timescale, even though the process I use has evolved over time. My current method is to run through a year of memories over the course of a week or more. There are now approaching 9 years to cover.

I was becoming frustrated because sometimes I'd hit blanks and either take a break for a few days or jump ahead and hope I could come back and fill in the blanks - which generally does work.

Yet, as the reviews have taken longer, the monthly target of reviewing each image has become a forlorn hope and I face the prospect of each review being harder every time and blank days appearing and joining up into voids in my memory.

Just like the years before I began this process, where the reference points are few and far between.

But it struck me as I was recalling images of my mother, now in the later stage of Alzheimer's where she no longer remember me or her husband of 62 years, that this experiment was always about remembering.

Remembering the days I have lived. The people I love. The experiences we have shared. The places we have been.

I've currently been progressing through 2016. Before my mother's illness was bad, but when there were signs of it. Those signs are more poignant now. The times of normality and happiness more precious. Revisiting the past continues to be enriching as I see it differently as my vantage point changes and its impact on the present also changes.

Going through these memory tags in the past few days, it struck me that this is no longer principally to refresh the images for my memory trick. I am going to stop worrying that it's taking far longer than a month to complete the cycle. That pressure is off.

I'll finish this year in the time it takes. Then move onto the next in the same way. But without pressure to hit some target of weeks or months covered in each period.

It is only the recent days where discipline is required to establish the images.

I am savouring remembering. Filling in most of the blanks. Sometimes resorting to looking back at pictures on my phone - which is not cheating, as I set the rule. A photograph can orientate me and suddenly unlock a whole sequence of memories.

Even as some images slip away from me, the memories of these years are far richer than the previous decades of my life. And I will continue to add my memory tag for each day.

This was always about remembering.

The Lockdown Challenge

Like half the planet I am currently on lockdown due to the coronavirus pandemic.

As I am living with someone who is in an at-risk group, I am not going out at all, other than for a walk around the grounds of our apartment block.

Days are pretty repetitive. But there's always something to single out as a memory tag.

I've been using the opportunity of knowing people will most likely be at home to call friends I haven't spoken with for years.

I've been recording some of my (bad) piano playing to share with family.

I've had Skype Sunday lunches with family in different houses.

I've been doing virtual runs - running in place/on the spot while watching a treadmill video on youtube and measuring my progress with my running watch in treadmill mode and a heart rate meter measuring my effort (so, for example, descending the Grand Canyon is a stand out day - yesterday, I started a virtual run of the New York City Marathon)

I've ordered shopping from a nearby store (not so significant, but still a landmark).

So, I can still run through the past month of lockdown and differentiate the days.

Without this process of measuring every day that passes, it would all be a blur. In fact, it would be difficult to even remember how long this has been going on.

Forgetting remembering

I'm approaching the 3000 day milestone in this process of remembering every day that passes.

It continues, but has changed significantly from the early months and years, when I could review the images pinned to my mental calendar in a short period of time. My early techniques of a moving windows, pulling up a few days from past weeks or months to refresh them have long gone.

Now I generally work my way through a whole year at a time, but it takes longer and longer to do so.

There are two reasons for this. Firstly, I am recalling periods that took place up to 8 years ago now, running through them day by day. To be honest, I've moved on from a lot of these times. There is no longer the same attraction of delving into those memories. Revisiting places I once lived and activities of previous employment does not interest me to the same extent.

So, I'm less motivated to review these times. All the same they throw up surprises and insights and I would like the option of being able to remember these days when I choose.

But it is also getting harder. The time between reviewing the same images is now over a month. It might take me a couple of weeks to run through a year of images, several months to cover the 8 years. Some days, I might not give any time to the process of the more distant review. The recent past is of more interest and I continue to use my refresh techniques for recent weeks and months. That may take all the time I have free for reviews in a given day.

Now I find I no longer remember the last time I recalled the images. When reviews were less than a month apart I could remember remembering. There was a familiarity to the sequence of images or their places on my mental calendar. Now I'm forgetting remembering. If I come across blanks, it is harder to recover them.

All the same, there are long periods where I whizz through the images rapidly, covering a week in a matter of seconds. After struggling with 2018 and thinking this process may be reaching its natural end, I've found I've rattled through 2017.

I'm trying to cultivate the feeling of relaxing into the reviews again. They have started to become frustrating when I've hit blanks and the images have eluded me, which has put me off the whole review process. Accepting an image and expanding my memory of what happened on that particular day helps fill the other days, even some separated my months or years.

So I'm not done yet.

Brain chemicals

Remembering every day that passes continues to be part of my routine.

To stop the days for nearly eight years I've been doing this now from fading, I call up the images pinned to my mental calendar as memory tags. The techniques I used in the early months and years, as described in the "how I remember" posts can no longer cope with the volume. Instead of moving windows recalling images from a few days each week or month, I now run sequentially through the days.

Sometimes I start with 17 December 2011 and work forwards. Sometimes I'll complete the current year and then each previous year. Sometimes a year here, and a year there.

Generally at some point of the month, I'll recall the images for the same month of each year, for the perspective on my life it brings me. It's now October. It's interesting to know what I was doing for every day of each October from 2012 to the present year.

Sometimes I can rattle through a period of days or weeks in seconds. Other times, I'm stuck and may have to range ahead until I find an image to anchor me and then can try to fill in the blanks.

There are two realisations this ever growing challenge to refresh the memory tags have brought.

Firstly, it seems recalling the images about once per month is about right to maintain easy recall. I know when a retrospective of the current month in past years strikes images I've recently remembered because they come so easily to mind. However, covering the whole eight-year period takes more than a month now and I fear it will become progressively more difficult.

And the longer it takes to find the images, the less I get done in the short snatches of time when I do this, and so the longer between recalls. It's a vicious circle. Previously such challenges have led me to find new refresh techniques. But I don't seem to have anywhere else to go now. It seems inevitable blanks will appear or I'll simply give up on the recall procedure.

The second realisation is that there is something going on in my brain that determines how easy it is to recall images.

I sometimes find I am struggling to fill the blanks in a month and so put it aside and get on with something else or move on to the next period. But then I'll come back again and suddenly the images all pop into place (I can remember the point I had reached in the refresh process from the wave front of clear images).

It may be that a specific memory tag orientates me and triggers other recalls.

But other times it seems there is something else going on, as if the presence or lack of some brain chemicals makes all the difference.

It is worrying in a way that my ability to recall varies like this. My mother has Alzheimer's and I see how her ability to connect varies throughout the day and from day to day. Might there be a link? Could this be an early symptom in me?

On the other hand, it could be down to my level of tiredness or blood sugar.

It's something I will continue to explore.

On this day

Opening Facebook sometimes on my phone, I get one of those reminder messages of something I posted two, five, seven years before, or whatever.

Before scrolling down to take a look, I take a few moments to scan through my mental calendar to predict what it will be. Usually, I can figure it out.

When I can't it's generally because it's a photo from a running road race I took part in a few days before. These become available from official photographers some time later. Now I've got used to this, I check for the last race I ran when I don't have a specific event for the date that might have prompted a posting.

It's a useful test and a reminder that, but for this process, I would rarely have a clue of what would be pictured. I wonder how surprising they are to others, or can you predict?

Playing the piano for 10,000 hours

I've not read Malcolm Gladwell's book "Outliers: The Story of Success", but I've come across the theory that an expert at anything is not an innate genius, but has practised for an average of 10,000 hours. This has been attacked as over-simplified or plain wrong, but it has revolutionised by attempts to learn to play the piano.

I have tried to learn the guitar, piano and even penny whistle many times over the years. I decided to try again in January 2019, but decided that this time I would practice every single day for at least an hour. That made me think of the 10,000 hour theory. I did a calculation and found that if I practised for just over an hour per day then I would reach 10,000 hours in 26 years' time.

That brings home how much practice is involved.

I was not put off, however, reasoning that after even a few hundred hours, I'd be able to knock out a tune as a party piece without becoming flustered.

I investigated apps promoted for forming good habits and downloaded one where I have set my target of 10,000 hours and enter my daily total of actual hours to eat into this. I already use a pomadoro timer on my phone to time 30-minute chunks of time for work activities and added the category of "music" to log the time spent on this.

And away I went, working through the exercises in a piano tuition book I had downloaded on a previous attempt to learn the piano.

This time, I did not get so disillusioned with apparent lack of progress, or the fact that my progress showed me still far off being half-competent at playing "London Bridge is falling down". I checked my app and I had only done, say, 30 hours, so what could I expect? That's less than a week of full-time study.

One of the criticisms of the 10,000 hour theory is that it is not just the time spent practising, but the type of practice, which has to build up the fundamental skills. This led to two thoughts. Firstly, it doesn't matter if my playing is plodding or error strewn, as long as I am building up a particular skill.

I once taught myself - and then many friends - to juggle. In that, my approach was to focus on one thing at a time. Throwing from your right hand towards your left, for example. Throw it in a nice arc and catch it. Once you've seen you can do that, take a second ball in your left hand and drop it before catching the first. Don't worry where it goes, just get rid of it. Once that is mastered, think about throwing the second ball in a reverse arc in the direction of your right hand. The throwing and catching of the first ball goes to hell. Just remind yourself you have already cracked doing that - and remind yourself a few times, so that you do it out with a corner of your mind - then go back to the task in focus. Before too long, you can do arcs from both hands, then introduce the third ball. Soon you are juggling, without having to focus overly on any single task, although you can zoom in on any aspect to perfect it.

So I focus on my left hand playing the piano. Then the right. Then matching the rhythm perfectly to the metronome. Then thinking about the chord changes. And so on. Once I've mastered a song – or I'm tripping myself up by over-thinking it – I'll increase the speed, or play it with my eyes closed, or change the instrument. When I return to it again, usually better than before, I'll focus in on different aspects, looking for patterns, rhythms, muscle memory, coherence of notes, expression and the pleasure of playing. Moving on to the next piece, I can see that a new element has been introduced to develop another aspect of skill.

The second thought arising from the need to focus on skills was to have some lessons. So I booked a trial lesson, where some answers to my questions made an immediate difference to my abilities. I had tried guitar lessons a couple of times previously, but a combination of the tutor's approach and my lack of time investment meant I didn't progress – or, at least, didn't notice the progress.

Three months' later, I'm on 110 hours practice. Which, if this was a full-time endeavour, would be about three weeks' study – nothing at all if you think about how long you spent studying at school or college. Yet, even in this short time, I have pieces of the jigsaw coming into focus, if not yet coming into place, and feel that I am getting somewhere.

Just 9,890 hours to go.

So many days, so many years

I'm now over seven years into this process of remembering every day that passes, having started on 17 December 2011.

I've had to adapt the refresh process to review the images pinned to my mental calendar, but I still aim to revisit each day once per month.

Sometimes an image evades me now. But, even so, I do not accept they are fully lost, because on a subsequent run-through, I've had them come back to me with a flash of endorphins and relief that pins them more firmly to the calendar for next time.

This process has changed my concept of time. Many of these years are so long ago that, save for this process, the whole year would be largely lost to me. If I choose a year before I began – let's say 2009 – I can work out where I was and what I was doing in that year and, if I think about it, maybe remember some specific events, some of them vividly. But the images are sparse. What did I do on my birthday that year? My wife's? My mother's? I have no idea and, if I do scratch up a memory, then I'd have no certainty it was for that year.

I can answer that question for every year since I began this process. Of course, I only easily remember the images pinned to my mental calendar. Sometimes these will open a door to much more regarding both the event represented and the rest of the day, but often, they are all I have left. After all, as I write this, there are 2,669 days stretching behind me.

The most curious – and even disturbing – aspect of having these memories and revisiting them as I do, is the shock at how long ago these years are. I will recall an event at, say, the Olympics in 2016 and it seems staggering that was almost three years' ago.

As I have carried these days and years with me, like no others, there is a freshness to them that makes it hard sometimes to separate one year from another. In the normal scheme of things, the fading of our memories perhaps gives us a sense of how long ago a time was.

Just no stopping

It's a while since I've posted here, so this is to check in to say that this process of remembering every day that passes continues as I near the 7 year landmark on 17 December.

I continue to use the same methods discussed here to add memory tags to my mental calendar, reviewing the past month, morning and evening, and calling up a selection of days preceeding that. Sometimes I'll use a two or three-day window covering the same days of the week, such as Friday to Saturday of every week from January 2018.

Once I've covered the year over the course of a week, I might just take the same days of the months. Today being the 8th December, that would be the 8th and 9th of each month.

My technique for reviewing a selection of memory tags prior to that has become much more relaxed. I've been switching between sequential reviews, covering the whole period month by month until I reach the present day, then doing the same year by year in reverse: 2017, 2016, 2015 etc.

Other times, I'll take a month from each year, then cycle back to the beginning.

With over 2500 days, it might take me a couple of months to do the recall of the whole period in spare moments of time, out running, waiting in a queue, driving, etc.

I run through some sequences with ease, like a familiar song. Others seem as faded as they should be by the intervening years and there are taunting blanks on my mental calendar. But if ever I think this process has run its course, they come back to me, often flooding me with gratitude that I have not forgotten the events captured in the tags.

I fear it will become harder and harder as the review periods become longer. For a long time a month between reviews seemed the limit, but now I am stretching to two months.

Yet, such is the powerful feeling of reward when my synapses fire and an elusive image reasserts itself, I am hopeful that my brain will become better at doing this with time.

The importance of the map

For over six years I have been pinning images to a mental calendar as memory tags to remember every day that passes. 

To prevent these fading away, I find I have to review them within a month or so. This simply involves calling up the image, which may take a few seconds. Less, if I have a sequence of related images.

I now have over 2300 days to recall since December 17, 2011, and the review patterns I have used over the years have had to evolve as the number of days has grown.

Currently, I recall the days sequentially, aiming to cover several months during the slack time during the day, when driving, exercises, or preparing to sleep or after waking up.

Previously, I used patterns. For example, at the outset I recalled the images for the same day of the week from past months, or for a two or three day window.

The sequential approach is easier in some ways, as there is often a progression of activities or events from day to day. It is easier to orientate myself.

But recently I have found that more recent days have presented the greatest problems with recall. I have to find my way through the sequence. The images are less associated with the mental calendar that I picture in my mind's eye.

So I have returned to the past technique of recalling a two-day window per week for the past six months. Today being Thursday, I recall the images for every Thursday and Friday in this period. 

Stepping from week to week on the month-to-view calendar sheets I visualise more firmly fixes the image to the geographical location of the day on the calendar. 

This spatial awareness is an important additional tool for helping me find the images.

Six years later

I began remembering every day that passes on 17 December 2011.

The sixth anniversary has passed and here we are in 2018, over 2200 days later.

I'm still going strong, though recently switched the nature of the long recall of days I do every month to refresh the images pinned to my mental calendar as memory tags.

Last time, I start on 1 January 2016 and went through the whole year, day by day. Then the same with 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012 and 2011 (much of 2011 is blank as there were few landmarks I was able to identify retrospectively).

I started with 2016 because in the previous strategy of jumping through the months, recalling two weeks chunks, was becoming increasingly confusing and I'd struggle to complete the final year or two in the time available before I had to start again. So I took it leisurely and sequentially, which makes it much easier to find the tags.

Then I started again with 2011. I'm currently up to August 2013 and fit in a few months each day, with no real pressure as to when I finish. I'd like to do so in less than a month, just because that is the longest I've ever left a memory tag before refreshing it. I'm not sure how well they will survive otherwise.

I still do the last month of tags, morning and night. Every now and then, I'll go through the past 6 months sequentially or two days per week, as of old.

There is still a lot I get out of the grounding of recalling these past days. Although as they have grown to over 6 years - over 10% of my life - the period I can remember day-by-day does not seem so different to the earlier foggy period.

The past is another world, even when I can revisit the memories.