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Year in review

End-of-the-year summaries have never been my strong suit, not least because I tend to measure time on completely different terms than the standard calendar (like counting up from the anniversary of an important event, for instance). And since nobody seems to be able to agree on whether the decade ends this year or next (anyway, doesn’t any ten-year span count as a decade?), I think I’ll leave that one alone as well.

Instead, I thought I’d share my own way of marking time—an experiment that I’ve been working on for two years now.

My friend Sarah Christianson has spent the last several years documenting the history of her fifth-generation family farm. Among her family artifacts are several of her great grandmother’s daily diaries, which Mrs. Anderson faithfully kept for many years. As you can see, there isn’t much space to write (so most entries say things like, “Went to the store, visited with Mildred,” etc.)—but what really interested me was how the five-year format of each page paints a larger picture of a woman’s life.

Sarah and I were both inspired to start five-year journals of our own, but I decided to turn mine into a sketchbook. I loved the idea and the challenge of documenting each day with a tiny, panoramic image.

Almost every drawing depicts something mundane, even trivial; it might be a sliver of that day’s activities, or just a snippet of an object that caught my eye. I’m almost never specific in the brief phrase written in each space—in fact, already I find myself forgetting what I was referring to when I go back to look at past entries. When I do remember what I was talking about, though, each illustration triggers my memories better and more richly than any of my photographs or writing can.

But that’s not the point of this project; this was never meant to be a detailed journal of my every thought or action. Instead, I’m trying to remind myself to really look at the world around me, and to live in my own present.

Now, exactly two years into the project, the same type of narrative I found in Claire Anderson’s diaries is already beginning to emerge. The drawings serve as a sort of flip-book; as one pages through the journal my personality, tastes and interests come to life, and the result is a more complete picture of myself than I ever could have come up with consciously. And an interesting by-product of all of this is the sometimes-unwitting documentation of the current era—this book might prove to be useful in other ways, someday.

The really curious bit is how the book is both intensely personal and completely ordinary. There isn’t a single image in there that I couldn’t share with a total stranger (no nudity, no embarrassing missives, no dirty laundry, etc.), and yet I’ve only actually shown it to a handful of people. I’m not sure why that is, but now that I’ve gone “public” about it I’m sure I’ll post occasional excerpts from here on out.

At the very least, maybe this will tighten the screws on my discipline a bit. Sarah and I learned quickly how difficult it is to keep a daily journal like this, whether in words or pictures (I doff my hat to Mrs. Anderson’s habits)—it’s all I can do to keep up with it, and I’m often playing catch-up. But now that I see how worthwhile the effort has been, I find myself excited for whatever tomorrow brings.

And isn’t that the whole point?

Wishing you a happy New Year full of wonderful events and tiny moments worth savoring—however you choose to remember them.