The Art Of Making Memories

Memories shape our hopes and our dreams for the future.

After two nights of unintentional apocalyptic doom movies, I couldn’t shake the perspective that all we really have in the end is our own experience. “Everyone dies.” My husband offered attempting to dismiss the dark and foreboding themes we’d accidentally taken in. The concept felt naked. My caffeine-fueled mundane task-driven life was suddenly challenged for value.

They’re stressful stories. The only lighthearted elements in both films centered on the paradox of value and importance of nostalgic memories. I was able to pick up and resonate with these themes instantly in part because I was currently in the middle of a very interesting read: The Art Of Making Memories: How To Create And Remember Happy Moments by Meik Wiking

This book was a bit of a surprise. I purchased it knowing absolutely nothing about it assuming the cover summed it all up. (Wrong of course) I was expecting a fluff read the non-fiction guilty pleasure kind I like but it was much more than that filled with a lot of scientific, curious, and useful information. I blame my assumption on the cover, which is both elegant and fanciful.

As a goal-oriented person, I have had a problem with putting my own happiness behind milestones in my life. While this might sound like a pragmatic way to achieve things, I can tell you from experience that it almost always ensures that you are miserable and burnt out. “I’ll be happy when dot dot dot” Is one of the most toxic thought patterns you can indulge.

Like most outlooks, this one folds like a lawn chair when you’re confronted with an end-of-the-world scenario. This is because:

Happiness is a process of cultivation not a goal to achieve.

Children are a great earth-shattering force that can wake you up to this concept. That’s how it happened for me anyway. When my daughter came along, all my professional achievements stopped skid-tire. And instead, I started focusing on creating happy experiences and a beautiful existence for my family. It turns out that the more we focus on our own happiness, the more it will elude us. By focusing on memories and experiences instead of blind happiness I was able to fall in love with pursuit instead of happiness itself.

Memories are more than comfort food for your thoughts “our satisfaction with life- our happiness depends in part on whether we have or create a positive narrative in our life.” Memories actually shape our hopes and our dreams for the future.

While happy memories can be curated, most are unintentional. This whimsical book sums up how to retrieve and create positive memory recall. It also discusses how to lead a life that is filled with personal meaning, the impact of being present, and how to develop memory-making methods.

The most effective way to make solid happy memories is to implement traditions. These do not have to be conventional, but you do have to decide to care about these events for them to become culture. The key is to pick a varied range of traditions that space out from specific events, weekly, monthly, to only once a year. This doesn’t just work to design a memory-making factory it creates a foundation for nostalgia even when our attention and time are limited.

“There is a growing body of evidence that nostalgia produces positive feelings and boosts self-esteem and sense of being loved and at the same time reduces negative feelings such as loneliness and meaninglessness.”

Meik Wiking

Here are 7 of the best nostalgic memory building traditions

What are some of your favorite memory building traditions?

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