This entry is part of an ongoing series about how we've documented our adventure.
Why do we write? We write to capture our lives, to record our adventures, to share with our family and friends, and maybe, to leave a legacy for our children. Writing helps us assign meaning to the string of ephemeral moments that make up our time on this planet.
I believe that every day, no matter how mundane, has a gift to offer. All I need do is remember to take notice of the world around me. It is this, the taking notice which has been the greatest lesson I've gleaned from our daily writing discipline.
I must write it all out, at any cost. Writing is thinking. It is more than living, for it is being conscious of living.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Whether we're off exploring a new country, climbing mountains, meeting strangers, or simply trying a dish I've never had, my senses are heightened with purpose. I'm noting and recording the smallest details, saving and remembering the sights, smells, sounds, flavors, and emotions of the day.
The act of writing has changed who I am and how I view the world. Carrying the knowledge that I will be documenting an experience urges me to approach life with an unabashed inquisitiveness.
When it's time to write, we try to throw ourselves into the multi-sensory memories we've collected, re-living the experience as fully as we can. Writing takes a lot of time, and is often frustrating, but we try not to allow ourselves to quit until we've done justice to the event we're archiving.
Once we've committed an experience both to memory and to "paper", we feel an overwhelming sense of joy. It's crystallized, cataloged, captured for all time like a bug in amber, stored where we can revisit it over and over again, whenever we wish.
Things which might be swept along with the speeding passage of time, only to be forgotten, we are fighting to isolate and elevate. We want to highlight the beauty and intensity of living passionately. From picking a ripe strawberry, to losing one's glasses, from being given Easter eggs from an old Serbian woman, to eating a massive ice cream sundae… these simple things that might have been lost are now remembered, and celebrated with gratitude.
