Draw Meaningful Memories

You’re sitting on the beaches of Ibiza. Click. You’re sitting on the top of a mountain in the Alps. Click. You’re sitting in a hotel in Berlin while your friend is attempting to jump on the bed from approximately 2,5 meters. Click. You’re sitting in your own garden, or on your own balcony, and your dog comes up to you looking particularly cute. Click.

Whatever you have done this summer, or whatever you are still planning on doing, it is safe to say you have taken some - click - pictures. What to do with them? Store them on your ever-growing hard drive of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of pictures? Throw them all away on a Buddhist instinct? 

Perhaps a middle ground is useful here. Perhaps you can pick your most valuable picture(s) of this summer and turn them into a piece of art. To make the memory really special, instead of filing it away in the sea of soon-forgotten memories. 

Making Memories Stick

So what do you do? We covered some great applications for this. Becasso & Graphite. But is that cheating? I don’t know. It certainly does not do justice to the time and effort you might want to spend on making a memory worth remembering. 

So take an iPad, an Apple Pencil, and perhaps a PenTips Lite or PenTips 2. Pick your favorite photo and start drawing. This process might bring you closer to the memory because it makes you focus. 

Let’s get really philosophical here. I studied it for over half a year so I’m basically Aristotle. If you take a lot of pictures on a trip, the cost of creating a memory goes down drastically. You can take as many as your 128GB phone can hold. That’s plenty. Since there is little effort, there is little attachment. So while you can have more memories, all those memories have a superficial connection to you at best. Most will probably be forgotten. 

Now imagine you had to draw all the moments you wanted to remember. This would force you to really decide what is worth remembering. In other words, you have to ask yourself what is really meaningful to you. Now obviously it is next to impossible to actually do this. Drawing on the spot would simply take too much time. 

So the *click* is useful after all. It allows you to make a selection when there is time. When you sit at home scrolling through one picture after the other. You can pick the most impactful ones and take the time to draw them. To focus, to relive the moment, and eternalize it in a special way. 

“Think of me long enough to make a memory”, as goes the song by Nightwish. And don’t feel bad or guilty about forgetting all the other things. You are human, not a hard drive.