If you want your experience to be of value to you you have to think about it. You have to pay attention, to mind it. You have to mark it, say “This is important.” You want to remember it and remember it as accurately as possible. Memory is important if you want to get real value from your experience.

The best way to keep up with your experience is to document it. Keep records. Take a lot of photos. Capture all the detail you can. Keep receipts, cards, ticket stubs. Put names and dates on everything so you can always know when events occurred. Write notes of what was important to you at the time, keep a journal of some kind, comment on the photos and whatever else comes to your mind.

Use something like a star system to rate importances, give the super highlights five stars, the days that turn your life in a new direction, whether up or down, those times you discover you’re not the same person you were before. Make some notes on how the new you differs from the old.

I know it sounds like a lot of work, but down the road big payoffs await you when you take your chance to look back over where you’ve come from and wow yourself.

Here’s a poem really worth catching, Writer’s Almanac 4/25/14

A Rainy Morning

A young woman in a wheelchair,
wearing a black nylon poncho spattered with rain,
is pushing herself through the morning.
You have seen how pianists
sometimes bend forward to strike the keys,
then lift their hands, draw back to rest,
then lean again to strike just as the chord fades.
Such is the way this woman
strikes at the wheels, then lifts her long white fingers,
letting them float, then bends again to strike
just as the chair slows, as if into a silence.
So expertly she plays the chords
of this difficult music she has mastered,
her wet face beautiful in its concentration,
while the wind turns the pages of rain.

— Ted Kooser

from Delights & Shadows (Copper Canyon Press, 2004).