[Note: I'm transcribing the videos from my YouTube Channel and back dating them to when I posted the videos for those who prefer reading. If you prefer watching, visit my YouTube channel at www.youtube.com/@suzannesewell]
I launched my YouTube channel in order to inspire people to preserve their memories and revive their most meaningful ones. The reason I want to do that is because I want to preserve my memories and revive the most meaningful ones myself. By inspiring others, by sharing ideas, I can also be preserving my memories and reviving what matters the most to me.
This has been something that has been close to my heart my whole life. Since I can remember, I have always known that if there was a fire in our house and everyone was safe, I knew where the photo albums were and I would try to grab them if there was time.
I'm not sure where this started. I don't know if there was a firefighter that came to our school and asked what we would grab in a fire, but it's something I always knew. No matter where I lived even after I moved away from home, I would know where my albums were so I could grab them in case of fire, or in case of evacuation. That was really important to me.
When we started a family, I started scrapbooking and my album collection really started to grow. I ended up with dozens of photo albums, especially after I was also teaching classes and hosting workshops where we would work on our albums together. As my collection grew, I realized that my escape plan didn't really work anymore. I couldn't grab all those albums in case of a fire. If I was given 24 hours to evacuate, perhaps, but in a spur of a moment, those albums would not be saved.
As a backup I used to keep negatives somewhere else, so if something happened to the albums, at least we had negatives to reprint the photos. This all changed when digital photography emerged.
I stopped scrapbooking around 2008 because I became overhwlemed. We had a digital camera for 3 years and as time passed, I felt even more overwhelmed and kept procrastinating. It got worse when we got cellular phones carrying a camera with us all the time. The number of photos we take now in one year is approximately what we used to take in 10 years. Globally we take 1.4 trillion photos every year. This is equivalent to100-200 photos a year on average per person in 2000; and 1200-1500 per year per person in 2020. (My average is much higher, how about you?)
What do we do with them all? Ten years after I stopped scrapbooking, I really felt the weight of the clutter on my shoulders, especially because it was so meaningful to me to keep my memories alive. In 2019, I started a big catch-up project called Revive55 Project, spending 55 weeks, ending on my birthday to get all my memories back in order. I wanted to stop feeling overwhelmed and scared that I would lose my memories. Of course, I had the memories in my head, but photos and memorabilia help us to remember. When we see a photo, we often say "oh right, I remember that". You may have felt that when you saw a Facebook memory pop up on your feed that you had forgotten about.
So much was happening with our kids in their teen years, and without scrapbooking, I felt like I would forget all the moments. Scrapbooking helps us to remember because we are going through and reliving those moments as we scrapbook.
Some of the things I worked on that year, I realized weren't really time well spent; and other times, I wondered how we could do it more efficiently, and revive our memories in a way that it doesn't take so long. Because really, we don't want to be stuck in the past reliving our old memories. We want to relive them but not all the time. We want to also chase dreams, look to the future as we are living in the moment. We want to capture new memories, not just preserve our old ones. That's where Present Harmony comes in that we look back with gratitude of our memories we loved and we look forward with hope of capturing new memories and all of that happens in the present.
In the present, we're looking back. In the present, we're looking forward. Our future will become our present. That's why I wanted to find a better and more efficient way of preserving our memories so it's not as overwhelming a process as it could be if we tried to continue to preserve our memories in the digital world like we did in the film world. That old way didn't work for me anymore, so I wanted to explore new ways of preserving our memories.
No comments:
Post a Comment