It was high time I got my butt in gear. I have been blessed with this adorable little family, one handsome husband and his two look-alike sons. I need to capture their lives–and mine–because if you don't put it down on paper it is likely you will forget it. The memory is fickle like that. The beautiful and small moments trickle through your conscious until they evaporate for good, lost to who knows where.
I am reading Donald Miller's new book right now, "A Million Miles in a Thousand Years", which details his time of editing his life (the memoir "Blue Like Jazz") in order to adapt it to a screenplay. While working with two men who make movies for a living, he discovers that his real life was essentially too "boring" to capture a viewers attention. The book chronicles his time "editing his life into a great story, to reinvent himself so nobody shrugs their shoulders when the credits roll".
The back of the books says, "Miller goes from sleeping all day to riding his bike across America, from living in romantic daydreams to fearful encounters with true love, from wasting his money to founding a nonprofit with a passionate cause". I feel like that is so the heartbeat of this blog. I want my life to be profound and great–and I also want to document those little moments that make it such.
From Chapter One of Donald's book:
"The saddest thing about life is you don't remember the half of it. You don't even remember half of half of it. Not even a tiny percentage, if you want to know the truth. I've got this friend Bob who writes down everything he remembers. If he remembers dropping an ice cream cone on his lap when he was seven, he'll write it down. The last time I had talked to Bob, he had written more than five hundred pages of memories. He said he captures memories because if he forgets them, it's as though they didn't happen, it's as though he hadn't lived the parts he doesn't remember." –A Million Miles in a Thousand Years
How profound, how simple. Get it down on paper. Remember the moments that make life full.
Some of my inspiration for the photo element of this challenge came other bloggers, namely Ashley Ann from Under the Sycamore and Deb Schwedhelm from Deb Schwedhelm Photography. These women do a phenomenal job documenting their own families well–and then putting them into books for posterity's sake.
I also found myself looking through CDs of photos I had archived and found so many good ones that I had forgotten about. How quickly our current day and situation replaces the memories of days gone by. My honeymoon was less than 5 years ago, but I already forgot about this gem.
And then less than a year after that, I found myself living 600 miles away from home and housing the first addition to my new little family.
How can I forget these moments? When I look at the pictures, they seem as close as yesterday…but without the visual reminder, they slip through the cracks of my full-to-the-brim mind. These are just two classic pictures from husband and my first year of marriage. These images bookend the start of our marriage and the end of our first year. So much happened in between (getting pregnant, graduating college, moving 600 miles away from every speck of family, husband starting a corporate job…and those are just the big things!). That's what I'm setting out to document this week, the in-between moments that are like magic to the mind…slipping in and out of my conscious.