After about a year and a half of typing up my journals at a frenzied pace, then finishing the six-month marathon of studying for my pharmacy tech certification, I finally began the task of scanning all of my photo albums.
The original mission was to marry the pictures with the journal entries. And yet…it proved to be a far more enormous task than I’d originally thought. As usual. I even stumbled across yet another journal while searching for all my photo albums. Fortunately, that journal was smaller than A4 size and written in big handwriting.
Most of the albums had loose pictures that were hastily stuffed in either the front or back cover of photo albums, which I sat aside for that magical time known as “later.”
Instead of merely focusing on the pictures that I’d journaled about, I started scanning all of them. Unlike the journal pages, I didn’t shred any pictures. Something far more precious about an actual picture than the original paper where I wrote down thoughts and experiences.
One of the motivations for typing up the journals was to shred them and not lug all that weight around, but the average album is far heavier than the average journal. Even so, I’ve not yet come up with a comfortable way to downsize those particular possessions.
During one of my scanning sessions, which only occur on the weekends, my nieces and nephew were visiting. I guided them down memory lane, showing them pictures of ancestors whose names they’d heard of, but who they never had the pleasure of meeting. We also had fun seeing pictures of their parents in their glory days.
With all the other projects that I juggle, I’m taking the slow stroll through the photo album memory lane. I have them stacked up and they’re still visible versus “hiding in plain sight.”
The task at hand is firmly embedded in that part of my brain where I put long-term projects. By small increments, I’ll eventually complete the process. Even those albums that couldn’t yet be added to the stack due to gravity making them tumble.
Perhaps by the time I finish the process, a new technology will have been invented to archive the actual pictures in a manner where I’m comfortable to downsize the actual albums. From here on out, one of my life goals is to maximize my experiences without accumulating material things.