Moving towards the end of the year always prompts me to become introspective.

What about you? Does it feel exciting, interesting, heavy, challenging, some combination of these feelings or…?

There are so many ways to gather memories from the past year. I love to…

• review my Instagram feed… it’s full of wonderful reminders of adventures, on my own, and with family and friends
• read my blog posts… such a cornucopia of diverse and, often divergent, ideas and practices discovered throughout the year
• run my fingers through my bullet journal to see tasks and play from the year… as I sought to experiment with new formats for planning and capturing my days, I sometimes lost track of the details of the days
• simply making time for a cup of coffee and a sit, to take in all that I have experienced… which happened several times over the past year in my quest to create a program about memory collecting and sharing. 

Each one of these journeys is an invitation to recall, and explore more deeply, the different facets of my life. There are reminders, celebrations, and at times cautionary tales of the different aspects of my recent past. They form another layer of my foundation for me to acknowledge and contemplate before stepping onto the new ground of the new year. 

Just a few of the mementos and photos that will become part of my visual legacy.

This process of collecting memories and making a collage of experiences is the seed for the sessions about creating visual obituaries (or, more gently/euphemistically stated, “sharing our memories”) that I have been hosting the past few weeks for clients and colleagues across the US.

I have loved designing these offerings, creating the containers for making the time and space in our lives to remember the wonderful, transformational, (perhaps painful) life-changing experiences, and the people (and pets) that are meaningful to us.

As Rachel Naomi Remen says in the foreword to The Five Invitations* by Frank Ostaseski,

“My grandfather taught me that a teacher is not a wise man, 

but a pointing finger directing our attention to the reality that surrounds us.”

This captures the essence of why I am drawn to memory collecting, this legacy work.

• What about you? How are you engaging with reflecting on the opportunities and challenges of this year? 
• Would access to prompts and a process for collecting, sifting, and sorting through memories be a resource you would use—maybe not just for remembering this year but also for a life review and legacy work? 
• Might having a companion in this process facilitate the experience? 

I hope you will make the time to sit with these questions. And, if a guide or companion on this journey feels like a collaboration that would facilitate your journey, I hope that you will reach out to me. 

Life is here now… Live every day.

* I totally recommend this book!