Use your senses to access memories
Your senses are the gateway to thousands of potent memories about your life journey.
Looking at an old photo can transport you straight back to that moment in time, where you can almost feel the environment and the people around you. That memory opens a gate to all sorts of other hidden memories that you hadn’t thought about in decades, or ever.
Memory works by association. One moment, you’re thinking about a place you visited in your twenties, and that favourite coat that you wore that you no longer have. Now you’re remembering other times you wore that coat to important events, and the people you once knew from those events, as well as the conversations you had with them, which remind you of something else. Before you know it, one photo has given you access to a treasure trove of memories you would never have otherwise accessed.
Food hits all of our senses. For me, it’s butterscotch candy. Whenever I have one, which is rare, I am transported back to being eight years old in my grandparents’ house. My grandfather kept a pack of butterscotch candies in a heavy wooden chest of drawers in his living room. Now I can remember the way he made me feel—seen and appreciated—and how he taught me to make things out of wood in his garden workshop.
I now remember my grandmother, who would make an Irish soup and call us in to eat it with her in her kitchen. My mind wanders around her kitchen and I notice things on the shelves and pictures on the walls. I haven’t tasted that soup in almost forty years, but I can taste it now in my mind just by thinking about it. I can see the steam rising above it and feel the joy of sharing that moment with them.
You can do this very easily as part of the process of life story writing. Pick up something old in your home—something you’ve kept in a drawer or at the back of a closet for years. Feel the weight of it in your hands, rub your fingers over it, smell it, and see where your memory takes you. Play music from a specific period in your life and let this take you back there.
Your senses are an instant passage and a direct reminder of your life journey. All you have to do is use them to get there and create your life story book.
