One of my favorite books is Donald Millers, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years. I just realized that this book isn’t on my Recommended Reading list and that is just wrong. Will be making that addition as soon as I’m done with this post.

There will be a number of posts written in this blog referencing things that just drilled me from this book but I will tell you the one that’s on my mind today.

It’s memories.

He talks about a friend that he has that writes down everything he ever remembers about his life. Now, I had a great childhood. Amazing friends and experiences. However, I am not one of those guys that remembers things very well. In fact, I often will run into people from my past and they’ll say, “Oh man, do you remember when this and this happened and you said this?!!” Nope. I don’t. Maybe if we stayed there a while I could finally extract it from my brain but I really am not good at remembering things from the past.

So. . . I decided to challenge myself one day on a flight from Los Angeles to Nashville. I went into Evernote and created a Memories file. Then created a separate folder for childhood friends, my childhood home, the lake I would swim in, my schools, sports, etc. I would pick one of them and just start writing. Every memory I could recall I would just dump it on the page. No editing. . .just write. It actually was an amazing experience. Things I hadn’t thought about in years were just flying back at me. They were good memories and that trip down memory lane was even healing in some respects.

You know, now that I’m 41 and have lived a lot of life, I sometimes can forget how I became who I am today. It’s so easy for my specific life situation today to feel like this is how it’s always been. But that’s not true. We are all the cumulative sum of our whole lives.

We are a body of work. Not just one year.

There is not a 1992 Bill and a 2008 Bill and a 2012 Bill. I think it would be far more accurate to say there is a 1971-1992 Bill, a 1971 – 2008 Bill, and a 1971 – 2012 Bill. We just add to and subtract from ALL these life experiences shaping and molding, pruning and growing us into who we are today.

I encourage you to find some time for this exercise. DON’T EDIT as the thoughts come. Just start writing. As you do, my bet is that you will recall something about yourself that you may have forgotten.

Give it a shot and let me know how it goes.