Documentation. Why carve out a section of your day to write something down or to take a picture or to capture a video?
Well that is because the real importance of documentation is to say that no one's life is boring.
The purpose is to ensue familiarity. To ensue familiarity, you tell your experiences through a story. The most important part of documentation is your ability to tell a story. And to tell it well.
In life, there is happiness and sadness and excitement and fear and guilt, and it is pivotal to not just document the sunny days. Documentation is an instrument that each human has complete control over. I mean, would we have anything to build our society's foundation upon if no one had jotted down piece by piece of what we define as history today?
Alluding to this metaphor, memories are just like another grain of rice. When you document something, you add color and feeling and experience to that one little grain, so you will be able to pick it out again in the bunch of other grains.
As cliché as this sounds, I want to look back in 10 or 20 or 50 years and say cool, I did something with my life. That I wrote it down in prose of captured it in a picture or a video. Having the memories of your life in tangible increments is absolutely priceless. And your job as a storyteller is to tear your cliché apart in its entirety and foster something novel and exciting and spontaneous.
On behalf of familiarity, if you choose to share your pieces of documentation, people want to see that they share a common interest with you. People want to see that hot new donut ice cream sandwich hybrid you are snagging at your local food truck festival. People want to laugh at your silly quirks and say I thought I was the only one. They want to follow your stories and find comfort in that.
It's all about the little things. Whether its fixing your coffee in the morning, just the way you like it or checking into a hotel into the Caribbean, you receive an audience, one that knows you and your loved ones like no one else. Through a blank slate.
This is the purpose of anything from Hollywood's renown movie arsenal to captivating novels to completely pointless iPhone clips that went viral over Facebook. Each piece of documentation helps foster a human connection with yourself and the ones around you. It is your responsibility to elicit some type of emotion from whatever you are documenting. This is because emotion is the envelope of all constructs of humanity; sound, touch, sight, smell and taste.
So whether you document for yourself, for your friends or for the world, remember that no life will actually be lived if it is not recorded. And your life is definitely not boring no matter how much you think it may be.
