Scrapbooks and Lanterns

Moments in life that are meaningful

Photo by Angel Videv on Unsplash

Today I wanted to pull together a recent experience with a friend, and a wonderful passage from a book I’ve just finished. The meaning behind a deliberately intriguing title will be revealed in due course – I’ll be the first to put my hand up and say I enjoy playing with the words of a title. So there.

First, a story. I really enjoy music and this has been a lifelong thing for me. While I play less these days, I fulfil my music needs with listening and in particularly, I do love live music. Every time I experience a concert or gig, I come away inspired, energised and I generally bask in the memories for days and often longer. Saturday night was a visit to a wonderful local venue (Isaac Theatre Royal) to hear a top draw music act (Scott Bradlee’s Postmodern Jukebox or PMJ. Yes, click on the PMJ link and listen to one song please, even as a soundtrack to this post.

I was there sharing this awesome moment with my family as part of an extended Christmas present. Also in the audience was my close friend Chris with his crew.

Chris and I had a little music conundrum prior to this Saturday night. After securing tickets for the PMJ concert last year, the line up of a local festival Electric Avenue was revealed including a bit of a bucket list band and we both thought would be great to see (The Prodigy). The festival was also on Saturday so it was what it was. FOMO, be gone.

Driving to the PMJ concert, we passed the festival. I gazed out the car window and had a random thought, followed up with a quick message to Chris. “Hey, looks like The Prodigy play at 950pm. Keen?”. Of course, all of this was dependent on timing. And it somehow worked.

At 930pm after the amazing PMJ concert, I was dropped off at the park. Myself and Chris wandered over to experience the gig from outside the fence. Not the same as being inside, however we had a clear view of the big screen, clear sound and it was awesome fun with a couple of hundred fellow cheapskates. And we had rogue golfcourse sprinklers that just added to the atmosphere. It was a fun 70 minutes.

So, that drawn-out story had a point.

It was a spontaneous, fun, memorable and cup-filling experience. The kind of thing we need in our life.

Now to the book - the following passage is from The Comfort Crisis by Michael Easter. It was presented in the context of having an awesome life experience, which reminds you to try to have more of them. ** By the way, we will be doing a podcast on this book in the next few months.

“Marcus Elliott told me that a critical benefit of misogi is what he called “creating impressions in your scrapbook”.

“If you’re seeing and doing all the same things over and over, your scrapbook looks pretty empty when you take inventory of your life,” he said.

“So we need to do more novel things to start creating more impressions in our scrapbooks, so we don’t feel like the years are flying by. I mean, you remember every single detail of novel, meaningful experiences. You have no change to forget them the rest of your life.”

I love this expression of scrapbooks. While they are probably a dying thing, scrapbooks bring up notions of cutting things out, compiling things and pulling them together in appealing ways that you can look through and reminisce. Somewhat messy and that’s ok. My Saturday night mission takes its place in my scrapbook. And our aim is to keep adding to that scrapbook with whatever it is that fills your cup.

I’ve also seen the metaphor of ‘lanterns on a string’. Each life experience becomes a lantern, and when you keep stringing these up to bring more light to your life. While these metaphors can get a bit whimsical, scrapbooks and lanterns are both fun ways of bringing some intentionality into this experiencing-chasing process and recognising when you have one of those experiences.

The best moments in life involve people, places, times and emotions.

Embrace them, savour them, share them and scrapbook them.