Hello everyone,
I thought I'd share an idea I had recently. Part of my quest to declutter has involved sentimental items such as photographs. This problem is easily solved by scanning the lot of them. They then occupy no space, and can be backed up for future generations. I've also found I can share them with family and not lose my 'original'. Pretty cool.
My big problem however, are my journals, and to a lesser degree, the love letters I have. These two items are big. My spouse and I are possibly strange in that we love to write longhand with fountain pens. We both keep journals in longhand, and have for decades. We both have written to one another throughout the years, particularly one year where my spouse was in Australia studying and I in Canada. The thing about writing is that it's not the same as photos and I had trouble finding a solution for writing that works as well as scanning does for photos.
First off, I have to say I don't see these writings as clutter. They are sentimental in strong ways. There is something unquantifiable about a handwritten note or journal entry. I love the intimacy of writing, and the knowledge that this exact sheet was written on by the person in their own hand. It lends a strength to the emotion of the work. As I've commented before, few things mean more to me than the interactions I've had with my loved ones, and I've seen personally how these items can be of interest to future generations. Therefore, I submit that, for me, they fall into the category of "things you truly love" and therefore should keep. It's been discussed on Unclutterer before that a possible solution for preserving them is to scan and store such works ( http://unclutterer.com/2008/07/17/organizing-and-preserving-written-letters/ ) or to go another route and simply discard the majority ( http://unclutterer.com/2007/10/18/what-to-do-with-old-letters/ ). Clearly, I am more a fan of the former. But I have a problem:
There is a LOT of content. I have far more letters than time to scan them at the moment. That doesn't touch on many journals, starting from school notebooks in the early 80s to three ring loose-leaf binders to leather bound journals. Those aren't easily scanned. In short, scanning isn't an option for at least 60% of the works. I have already digitized two decades of my journal, and the task was huge. Re-writing and word processing the work was awesome by way of a finished product (I now have two hardcover volumes published through Lulu) but took years, and I've only done a third of the content. It's not sustainable.
So, here's my idea: What if I used a good quality voice recorder and read the journals, entry by entry? What if my spouse read her letters to me and we saved them? The more I think of it, the better I like the idea. Of course, I'm not getting rid of the original, but having the journal read in my own voice keeps some of the intimacy of writing, although in a different way, and wouldn't take up nearly the virtual space my photo collection did, even at better than CD audio quality. Furthermore, the files can be saved anywhere so that if god forbid the originals were to be lost in some tragedy, the backups will survive--same as the scanned photos. If I really wanted to go all out, I could sit myself in front of the Mac's web cam and do personal logs for that true "Star Trek- The Next Generation" feel, although I expect that would truly tax the storage--video is more space consuming than pictures are.
Have any of you done something similar? Have you felt that it worked by way of storage while still satisfying your need to keep the innate intimacy of these precious memories?
Thanks for reading... :)
