My 55 week Revive55 Project ended a year ago. I thought it was a good time to reflect on the project and look forward.
I started the project in the hopes of preserving all my memories. I was feeling like my collection of photos, videos, stories and mementos was growing and was getting out of control. I was overwhelmed with the quantity and was no longer making photo albums or scrapbooks to preserve them. I had started to make yearly photobooks that could hold four times the number of photos in the same amount of space on my shelf but still felt like I wanted to do better.
I thought that focusing on my memories for 55 weeks would help me to "catch up" and help me better remember my stories and moments.
What I found though was that 55 weeks wasn't enough to preserve it all. I also didn't want to spend that much time preserving instead of creating new memories. Once I "caught up", then what? How would I preserve memories going forward?
The R55 Project started out with a bang. I had lots of plans. I did lots of shopping - buying products that would help preserve and display mementos and photos.
Many "memory projects" planned went undone or ended up half-done.
During COVID, I saw a meme that said if only I had a week (or a month) at home I'd get my unfinished projects completed. Then COVID gave us months at home and projects still went undone. So as some of my projects went undone, I wondered why. Was it because they weren't important or it wasn't worth the time they would take? How could I complete them in a better way?
Having taken a break and gained perspective, I am ready to re-focus my efforts to finally achieve what I had hoped. What I wanted was to feel like the memories that mattered were being collected and enjoyed.
Home organizers will say that decluttering is the first step to organizing a home. In hindsight, I see that I could have started there, but I wasn't ready. I made the rookie organizing mistake to go buy containers to organize the stuff rather than removing the excess first to see what containers were needed.
I still had a memories journey to take before I was ready to see that I shouldn't want to preserve it all. As much as I did preserve many memories during my Revive55 Project, I learned that letting go is just as important.
I read the Law of Attraction years ago. Looking back at my notes, I am reminded that Tool #9 is to "create a void or a vacuum". What this means is that we need to create space in order to attract what we want to fill it. The example in the book is in order to attract more clients, we need to make space in our filing cabinet for the new client's file. If the cabinet is bursting at the seams, there is no room for new clients.
When my memory boxes and photo albums were full; I would buy more. Eventually, my shelves and closets were full. My house isn't getting any bigger so I needed a better way.
Creating a void and making space would make room for new memories and isn't that the point in life is to experience it and not just to collect it?
The other thing I learned during my project is that by preserving it all, we diminish the value of the really special ones. Since my memories were piling up and not "preserved" I started to collect more mementos and to take more photos in the fear of forgetting, but this caused the most memorable ones to get even more lost amid the clutter. The quote I loved was "they are more beautiful if they are few". You can read my blog post about that quote here.
During my project, I was also trying to "unearth" stories I may have forgotten, but I learned that sometimes, we forget stories for a reason. A little digging reminded me of an unpleasant memory. Turns out there was a reason I had forgotten the details.
My old way of preserving memories was no longer working and I recognized that spending 55 weeks trying to preserve them in the old way wasn't the answer.
I wanted to find a better way and it needed to start by letting go of the quantity to find the quality.
Knowing that decluttering memories will make me happier doesn't make it easier though. Knowing something sometimes isn't enough to act but I am ready to try.
My new focus of my Revive55 Project will be to make space and to preserve only what is most meaningful.
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