[LINK] "The Value of Remembering Ordinary Moments"

[rfmcdonald]

Cody Delistraty linked to his essay at The Atlantic on research on the apparently quite positive results of journaling. Preserving memories turns out to be quite comforting.

At Christmastime, my brother, my father, and our chocolate Labrador pile into the car to drive across the state of Washington to see my grandparents. We’ve been doing it since I was born. The three of us—before my brother and I put our headphones in to tune everything out—try to have meaningful conversations. Soon I’ll go back to school in England, my brother will go back to school in California, and Dad will go back to work in Washington, a transatlantic triangle keeping us apart. The three of us are together twice a year, at best, but on our car trip there’s rarely anything new exchanged. We recount memories of Mom; we discuss job prospects, baseball teams, and books (if we’re lucky); and usually we end up having a brief argument about religion or politics to round it all out. Nothing to write down. Nothing to remember.

Quotidian life seems too banal to document. Why write down routine conversations, ones we’ve had a million times and will have a million times more? Isn’t it more important to remember extraordinary moments: first steps, graduations, jobs, awards, marriage, retirement, vacations? Yet people seldom realize how fondly they will look back on days spent mundanely: a day spent reading in the bay window, a picnic in the park with friends. These things may not stick out while they are happening, but revisiting them can be a great pleasure. “Who would call a day spent reading a good day?” writes Annie Dillard. “But a life spent reading—that is a good life.”
I saved a swatch of wrapping paper to remember not just the gifts but the pleasure of opening them.

Ting Zhang is on the eve of getting her doctorate at Harvard Business School, where her focus is the psychology of rediscovery. Most recently, she was the lead author of a four-part study published in Psychological Science. In it, she took 135 university undergraduates from the northeastern United States and had them create time capsules. In these capsules, the students wrote about a range of current experiences: their most recent conversation, their most recent social outing, how they met their roommate, three songs they had just listened to, an inside joke, a photo they had recently taken, a recent Facebook status they had posted, a sentence they wrote for a school essay, and a question they responded to on a final exam.

They then rated how curious and interested they thought they would be about seeing this time capsule in the future. On a one-to-seven scale, the students gave an average rating of three. Three months later, immediately before looking at the capsule, the students were asked again to rate how curious and interested they were in their capsules’ contents. Their average answer now jumped to a 4.34. What this shows, Zhang writes, is “that even simple interventions (e.g., taking a few minutes to document the present) could generate unexpected value in the future.”

So I decided to collect memories of the banal. I had five days with my family over Christmas and each day I spent 10 minutes writing about what we had done—what I had seen, eaten, touched, and smelled—and then collected an object to mark the day. When we went to the movies I brought home my ticket stub. When we went to a seafood restaurant I brought home a dolphin figurine that came with our bill. After we opened gifts on Christmas morning, I saved a swatch of wrapping paper to remember not just the gifts but the pleasure of opening them.