I have been very fortunate to have recently hooked up with several friends that I have drifted away from the last several years and it has been wonderful getting caught up. Over the holidays I had lunch (well it was supposed to be lunch but like an idiot I got the time wrong and showed up 2 hours late as they were leaving) with a group of high school friends that were made up from my old cheerleading squad (did I ever mention here that I was a high school cheerleader?) and a couple of their husbands who happen to be fraternernity brothers of mine. It was a total mind warp seeing some people that I had not seen in literally 22 years. Then I tracked down another fraternity brother of mine who I had not seen in about 5 years and found out he now owns a blues bar in town and so we sat around drinking and talking about old times. And then this week another high school/college/fraternity bro tracked me down and we have been getting caught up as well.
Well the one thing that all these encounters had in common was to induce a flood of memories to come crashing back to me. One of my most favorite things has to be sitting around with friends and starting each sentence with "remember when....". This all reinforces a philosophy that many of my fraternity brothers had back at school in that our primary goal was always to simply "make a memory" - to actually go into the night with the simple goal of doing something that you would be able to talk about years down the road.
Basically I have always looked at it that who we are is simply a collection of our experiences. The things we do actually help mold who we are and give us a perspective on life that is truly unique since everybody's experiences are different from everybody elses.
We tend to go through life sometimes with our blinders ons and our heads down just going through the motions of simply "being" and "existing" that we tend to forget to savor the journey. Yes it is an old cliche but it is so true that we all need to spend more time "stopping to smell the roses" and not to "loose the trees through the forest".
When I was the Director of Leadership Education for my fraternity I came up with a slogan for one of the schools that read "It is a journy we take..." - and that is so very true. It would be too depressing if we looked at life as having a destination because there is only one end point in life - DEATH. I like to look at life as a journey which is filled with many, many memories - some bad but hopefully most good.
Think how much more fun life would be if we approached it as trying to find the next "memory". But that is only half of it...once that memory is made we need to cherish and nurture and share that momory as if it was a child we gave birth to. If left on it's own, all memories will fade and be forgotten unless we go out of our way to share them.
So what memory did you make today?
Ok I came across something that is really cool and wanted to share. There is a site called Human Clock that consists of creative pictures that people have taken to reflect every minute of the day. You can even switch it to analog clocks but they are not as creative. Take a look at the right hand side of my page and you will see what it looks like live.
