There are some people, like Maya Angelou that Walt Whitman described as “so much sunshine to the square inch.” I know you associate with people (and hopefully have them on the “people” list) that you feel are sunshine in your life.
It’s very interesting to me that many of us, perhaps most of us, start scrapbooking because we want to remember and we want to celebrate our memories. Memories really are focused around the people we love and yet it is very easy to get into scrapbooking and begin to develop the skills, maybe learn how to organize pictures and how to design pages and pretty quickly and almost sort of naturally the focus shifts from maybe this idea that I’m going to scrapbook so that I can celebrate or record stories of my grandma or my own children or my childhood which is all very people focused. We shift. I guess it’s because sort of the general paradigm of photo organization is around events. Pretty quickly without even really being cognizant of it you can fall into a pattern of scrapbooking events.
You know – we did this, we went here, we celebrated this birthday, and sure grandma and grandpa are there and yes, of course, we saw the cousins when we went to the waterpark, whatever it is, but if you are not careful you end up with short captions that say, you know, fun was had by all. I say that a lot. I use that example a lot, but I really do see it as being a pattern that emerges in scrapbooking if you are not remembering why you started to scrapbook in the first place. With all of the pictures that we have and all of the overwhelm that sets in, and then there is the whole intimidation thing that creeps up because page are supposed to look a certain way. I know you’ve heard it before, but this audio message is dedicated to PEOPLE because people matter in our scrapbooks and here’s what doesn’t matter. What doesn’t matter is where the pictures are taken as much as what you are trying to capture. So what matters is not that you are scrapbooking an event or a moment or any one of the 12 topics, what matters is that you pay attention to who is involved in the memory and you try as much as you possibly can to say something about the people, say just some little snipped about the relationship that you have with them, the way you feel about them, something about that is unique about their personality, as much as we can, focus on people.
Now what happened to the magazine is I ended up teaching that and presenting that exercise enough times that it really became something that we did at Simple Scrapbooks. One time my boss was in the room, he had heard about this exercise and I did it with him there and he came up after and he said that we should figure out how to share this more, better, so we had kind of a brainstorm meeting. We were on the verge of starting to do some product at the magazine and so Simple Scrapbooks, and I don’t know if you remember, you may or may not, but we had a little paper book. We wanted them to be a very low price point and we wanted to have them sell at retail stores. They were quasi successful. The quality of the product, sadly, wasn’t very great and that’s because we weren’t product manufacturers, but that’s a whole another story. We did produce for about a year and a half these little booklets. I actually made one. I have several extra that I still have and I think they threw a lot of them away, kind of sad, but anyway the exercise is still good. I have a little video that I’ve posted that you can watch in which I share one of the 2-minute memories little Top 10 books that I created for my sister Darcy. It actually is one of my projects this week. You can watch for that. I will touch on it again on Dozen Day which is this Sunday…very exciting. So stay tuned for that. At the end of the audio we will do the 2-minute memory together.
Okay, so, if you’ve got your paper and your pen or pencil and a photo of someone on your people list or someone that you love let’s go ahead and start the exercise. I have the timer on my phone set for a minute and go ahead and close your eyes and try and get comfortable and just go to a place where you are very familiar and you spend time with this person in this place. Begin to think about the conversations that maybe you’ve had or the types of things that you talk about with this person or the things that you’ve learned from them, thing about how this person has made you feel and now all feelings need to be positive, but what are some of the feelings you associate with this person? What are the things that you see that remind you of them? What are the things that you taste or smell or experience that immediately brings this person to mind or brings something that you’ve shared together to mind? I’m going to just go ahead and let you enjoy immersing yourself in memories of this person.
Okay, open your eyes and start writing as fast as you can. Write down anything and everything that comes to mind. I’ll give you another minute to do that. Don’t try to write out all the details right now but try and capture all the different sort of topics that came to mind, just different foods or colors or feelings or places, or other people that you associate with memories around this person so that you could go back and sort of nurture or fill out each topic a little bit more. Just about 10 seconds left so keep writing as fast as you can. Usually at about this point when I’ve done this with groups of people live, most people have 3 or 4 or 5 things written down and at the end of a minute some people are still kind of writing a lot and some people have kind of hit their first pause with what else did I remember. What I’ve found is that everyone has something that they can finish up or revisit or go back to and fill in with more detail.
What I hope you experienced if you do this is just the fact that this kind of mental focus can generate memories. You can totally go immerse yourself in a memory of a person for just a minute, open your eyes and generate all kinds of good stuff. Hopefully you take time to do it with me but whether you are comfortable doing it with me or doing it on your own or doing it with someone in your family, you know, sit down family members and do it with them. I hope that you will practice this because it has been very helpful for me. Again, you can watch the short video that is posted in the classroom that is me sharing the result that of this 2-minute memory exercise focused on my sister Darcy.
So there you go. It’s People week. Spend time with your people list, see if you can distribute the worksheet to people that you know and love and get some of their perspective back and then engage as often as you want to and can throughout this year with this 2-minute memory exercise and use it to generate good detailed stuff about the people you love. People matter. Let’s scrapbook people!
A few questions to consider when scrapbooking the people in your life:
- Name:
- How you met:
- Occupation at this moment, and when you met, future goals...
- 2 things you have in common
- 2 things they are good at
- 2 of their favorite things
- 2 of their least favorite things
- 2 of their favorite foods
- 2 of their favorite books
- 2 things they are doing this week
- 2 things they have learned
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