I presented a short talk to about a hundred people on Sunday and I began with a number:
17, 288
That’s the exact number of days I was alive when I opened my eyes on Sunday morning.
And except for one young lad who was celebrating his 17th birthday and had lived a mere 6,205 days, most of the people in the audience had clocked upwards of 11,000 days in their lives.
You, too, have lived thousands and thousands of days.
But how many of those days do you remember?
I mean, you remember the happy milestones, right?
A graduation, a wedding, a birth, a coveted award, the day you moved into your dream home or you opened the doors of your business.
And you remember what I call your Meteor Moments — those events that happened while you were sailing down life’s highway in one direction but got slammed onto a completely different trajectory.
Maybe you were hit by the Divorce Meteor or the Bankruptcy Meteor or the Cancer Meteor.
But of the thousands and thousands and thousands and THOUSANDS of other ordinary days, you probably remember very few.
And of these, isn’t it interesting that often a day when you were six or seven years old is easier to remember than Tuesday morning from two weeks ago?
Certain days, certain memories, are so clear that decades later you can still smell the salt air or taste the sweetness of the cake or identify the exact shade of orange in the sunset or hear the drumming beat of the music.
And yet you often completely forget even these hyper-clear memories for years at a time until something you see or hear or smell triggers you to remember them again.
When I traveled to Costa Rica with my daughter more than a decade ago, I arrived at the hotel and discovered that I forgot to bring my camera battery. With no chance of replacing it, I was devastated at the thought of having no pictures to remember the trip.
But what a gift this was!
Knowing I couldn’t rely on my camera lens to remember the trip for me, I knew I would have to really experience my days in Costa Rica if I wanted to remember them. This meant I was much more present and alive in each and every moment.
I engaged with the line of ants crawling up the wall of the bathroom. I felt the squishy mud seeping into my sneakers as I dismounted my horse on the ride up the mountain. I noticed the air whipping past my cheeks as I held tight to the zip line and sailed across the canyon.
Of all the vacations I’ve enjoyed in my life, it is this one — the one where I was forced by circumstance to feel most alive in the moment — that has imprinted the strongest memories in my consciousness.
Being present will always be the most important step in remembering more of your life but there are other things that help you bear witness, too, and it’s perfectly okay to utilize these tools. If keeping a journal, looking at photographs, holding on to mementos or recording conversations helps you access your memories later on then by all means use them!
Perhaps this is why so many of us have a garment that we wore on some memorable occasion tucked away in the back in the closet.
Of course, I still haven’t figured out if outfits help to create memorable moments or if moments just make outfits more memorable!
Either way, I think we can all agree that dressing in clothes that celebrate your unique sense of style will always help you to be more memorable to others.
Which means the gal who sports today’s VPOD, a pair of vintage 1990s studded punk leather shorts by Gianni Versace, will be unforgettable.
Available at Vagabond NYC.
(To receive the VPOD free via email with detailed size and price information, sign up for the growing email mailing list here. Your information will never be sold or shared and you can easily unsubscribe at any time.)
