“When I gave such importance to archiving my life, it felt as if I was already dead,” said Karen Kingston, as if the moment we begin prioritising the archive, we step slightly out of life itself. The need to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs. The compulsion to write every thought down.
These ideas keep circling me.
I came across an Anaïs Nin quote again recently:
*“I am lying on a hammock, on the terrace of my room at the Hotel Mirador, the diary open on my knees, the sun shining on the diary, and I have no desire to write. The sun, the leaves, the shade, the warmth, are so alive that they lull the senses, calm the imagination. This is perfection. There is no need to portray, to pr…
“When I gave such importance to archiving my life, it felt as if I was already dead,” said Karen Kingston, as if the moment we begin prioritising the archive, we step slightly out of life itself. The need to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs. The compulsion to write every thought down.
These ideas keep circling me.
I came across an Anaïs Nin quote again recently:
“I am lying on a hammock, on the terrace of my room at the Hotel Mirador, the diary open on my knees, the sun shining on the diary, and I have no desire to write. The sun, the leaves, the shade, the warmth, are so alive that they lull the senses, calm the imagination. This is perfection. There is no need to portray, to preserve. It is eternal, it overwhelms you, it is complete.”
Why can’t I, too, feel that there is no need to preserve?
Why does it feel almost impossible to let a moment exist without turning it into words, photos, notes, some kind of proof that it mattered?
Anaïs Nin wrote this long before phones, notes apps, and digital storage, before all that enables us to document our lives as evidence (although I did this compulsively in binders and notebooks before, even as a child; I was cataloguing life).
I don’t only record happy moments. I record feelings. Thoughts. Confusion.
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I don’t think this means we should stop writing or remembering. But I do think it asks a difficult question:
When does recording become a way of avoiding presence?
When does organising life become a substitute for living it?
And yet, on the flip side, in The Fun Habit by Mike Rucker, which I read recently, he talks about how memories, both good and bad, continue to shape our wellbeing long after the moment itself has passed. When you have something tangible, like a scrapbook or a journal, you don’t just remember the moment; you get to relive it. There’s real joy in that kind of time travel.
So many of life’s peak moments are brief and surprisingly rare. Reminiscing lets us stretch those moments out far beyond their original window. We all experience this when we catch up with friends we haven’t seen in years, especially when there’s shared history, and suddenly you’re laughing about old stories like no time has passed at all.
Curation plays a role too, says Rucker. Memory keeping isn’t about documenting everything equally; it’s about highlighting the good, and also gently shaping how we hold the harder moments. I try to do this intentionally in my own memory keeping.
That thought gives me comfort, and a bit of reassurance that all this effort isn’t for nothing. It’s helping me carry joy, meaning, and connection forward, not just archive the past.
Maybe the real practice isn’t to give it all up (as I truly love better systems, better archives, better memory-keeping), but knowing when to stop. When to close the journal. When to trust that a moment doesn’t need to be saved to be real. Maybe one day I’ll sit somewhere warm and quiet, with words within reach, and feel, genuinely, that there is no need to portray, to preserve.
Just to be…
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Letting Go of Old Journals and Mementos
The Cost of Organizing Ideas – But I Keep Doing It Anyway
The Journal Project I Can’t Quit
Letting Go of the Fear of Losing Data
The Art of Organizing (Things That Don’t Need to Be Organized)