Time slips past us so quickly it’s sometimes difficult to keep up. When I was a child, it seemed to take forever for Christmas to come and now, as an adult in my early 50’s, Christmas seems to come along with alarming frequency.
I mention Christmas because there are a couple of things I’ve gotten in the habit of doing around the holiday season. First, I comb through my family videos and make, what I hope will be, a funny movie to show the family. Second, I start working on a retrospective of the past year. 
For my retrospective, I take all the pictures and videos from the past year, and lay out the entire year’s events in chronological order with a musical score. It’s not just the big events I focus on, it’s all the little things too – things that you might not think to include – like bagging up all the leaves in the fall, or a picture of my Father-in-Law’s fried shrimp at our Christmas Eve feast, or goofing around at work.
I chose music that’s important to me – like including “Jungleland” to memorialize the passing of Clarence Clemons. I used “The Thrill is Gone” to link the B.B. King concert we attended as a family with the death of Steve Jobs a few weeks later.
I like to think it’s not the big things in life that turn out to be as important as the small things. The handful of “important” events every year get overwhelmed by tsunami of little things that happen each and every day.
I find the process valuable in it’s own right. It’s a time to breath, to pause and look back at the past year and reflect. And, as I create more and more of these, I’m creating a nice way to look back and remember. Take a look at my 2011 retrospective, then try making one of your own.
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