The Gift of Memories

I've just lived one of those kinds of weekends that is nice to have the ability to look back on ...

It's been a while since I have 'made a movie'. There for a while I was making videos of everything. I had forgotten the reason why I got hooked on this in the first place.

It's a gift to have a day that stands out from the rest. It is also a treat to take a look at a regular day and realize that special moments happen all of the time. It is just a matter of noticing them.

I do believe that is why I reinvented myself after I got my Flip Video camera last December. I had the ability to not only capture these moments ... but to share them. Whether by video mail ... or on a blog ... or on a DVD ... or just to hold onto them to 'make a movie' later on.

We so often get caught up in the business of living, that we miss a lot that goes on around us. I can't begin to count the moments that I have caught the kids on video, replayed it later and found a completely different spin on something ... or something that I didn't even realize had happened at the time. In capturing my niece's wedding on video, there were several small things that I hadn't noticed until I had rewound the day and replayed it afterwards.

Life is like that. Things are happening all around us all of the time. Sometimes we are simply caught up in our own thoughts and don't notice something ... sometimes there is too much going on and you can't absorb everything at once ... sometimes you just have your back turned, your attention diverted or you just blink at the wrong moment. It's nice to have a way to replay a moment. To keep the memory fresh and to revive the memory when it fades.

It's like recording a moment of history. Something we can look at a day, a year or decades later.

So I have spent the better part of this day 'making movies'. I have become hooked on history this year. Today's special events are tomorrow's history. It's nice to have that history on record. I'm trying to record it every chance I get.

Now ... just to focus on living in the present!