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The View from Here: Preserving Memories as We Move Through Life
The author looking out over the southern Oregon mountains during a hike. The View from Here
As I experience the acceleration of time and the deceleration of activity, I find myself spending more time reflecting on my past and trying to remember all of the starting points, side trips, milestones, life shifts, people who have accompanied me through seasons of my life, and those who have witnessed my many forms of self. (And I, theirs.)
I recall the dreams and expectations I had for myself and my family. I recognize what fell away and what appeared that was never considered. I think about what was so important to me and how that has changed. And I connect the dots more easily between there and here.
First dance recital at age 4. 
Towards the end of a professional career in the title role of a production of Cinderella. 
Teaching ballet class and giving a correction to a student. Looking Back Through Different Eyes
I live in the now but frequently visit the past—not to pine for what might have been, but to enjoy again what may not have been fully appreciated in the moment.
It is an opportunity for gratitude, awe, and wonder. It is also an opportunity for humility, forgiveness, and compassion.
I see my today through the eyes of yesterday, and I regard yesterday through the eyes of the present version of myself.
Perhaps that is one of the gifts of photographs.
A photograph allows us to visit those earlier versions of ourselves—not simply to remember what happened, but to notice things we couldn’t see at the time. A face we had forgotten. A relationship that shaped us more than we realized. An ordinary little moment that seemed insignificant then but feels precious now.
The photograph hasn’t changed.
But we have.
I was starting kindergarten and my mother took me to get my long curls trimmed. She turned to tend to my little brother and in that moment, the trim became a pixie. She was so angry! And I hated it. I remember whining about how I “looked like a boy”. We Don’t Always Know What Will Matter
Sometimes a photograph makes us curious about what happened just before or just after the shutter clicked. Sometimes it brings back a story we haven’t thought about in years. And sometimes it preserves something we didn’t yet understand the value of preserving.
That’s one reason I have become so passionate about preserving photographs and the stories that go with them.
We don’t always know, while we’re living a moment, which moments will someday become part of the story we tell about our lives.
A birthday, a wedding, a graduation—we recognize those as important. But what about the picture of everyone sitting around the kitchen table? The blurry snapshot from a family vacation? The child asleep in the back seat? The person standing at the edge of the photograph who we can no longer ask about?
Those ordinary photographs can become extraordinary with time.
And sometimes, the stories connected to them are just as important as the photographs themselves.
In lockdown during the pandemic, my family and I spent a couple of days making many handmade masks out of materials that I had laying around the house. It still seems surreal. Tomorrow
Tomorrow?
Well, I’ve learned enough about life to keep the plans loose when it’s necessary to make them at all.
I have a better understanding that my choices today will affect my options tomorrow. I have hope that it will unfold with nuggets of wisdom, as well as continued gratitude, awe, and wonder.
I suspect that as my journey within continues to become more rewarding and beautiful, the physical experience of it will try my patience and fortitude and force greater acceptance than I am capable of at this moment.
So, it is not without trepidation that I look ahead.
Which, in turn, brings more gratitude to this moment right now—and for all of those leading up to now.
The Surprise of Getting Older
The biggest surprise about aging is that there are still surprises!
The child version of me believed that with age came clarity of EVERYTHING. And that given the amount of time it took to become the age I am now, for example, there was plenty of time to come to a complete understanding and acceptance of how life works and how to make every decision.
How wrong I was.
I could not have dreamed that it was possible to hold two contradictory beliefs as truths at the same time. I could not have fathomed that 60-some years could feel so fleeting when 50 minutes of Social Studies could be so interminable.
I could not have foreseen that beauty and gratitude are facets of death and grief as real as the deep well of sadness and loss that was all I could envision.
And perhaps that is another reason photographs become more meaningful as we get older.
A photograph of a person, a place, or a season of life can mean something entirely different to us ten, twenty, or fifty years later.
We change.
Our circumstances change.
Our understanding changes.
The photograph simply waits for us to see it differently.
My students kept my spirits up when we had to work from home over zoom during the pandemic. 
I lived near the studio and would zoom my lessons from an empty ballet room there. It was great to get out of the house each day! 
One of my students executed a surprise attack of lovely thankyou notes from her and her classmates as well as some flowers. This was a very uplifting moment after an evening alone teaching ballet classes from a n empty big studio. Nothing Is Important—and Everything Is Important
I have held a lifelong fascination with the passage of time, the meaning of life, the ever-changing opinion of what is important, and what TRUTH really is to me.
This is where I currently am:
Nothing is important—and everything is important.
Time is an instant and time is forever.
I know everything and I know nothing.
Truth is not a static thing, nor is there a singular truth—and contradictions are opposite sides of the same truth.
But most importantly, I think I am coming to understand that our time here is brief, and we have a lot of input when it comes to how it is lived.
And maybe preserving memories is part of that.
Not because we should spend our lives looking backward. Quite the opposite.
Because the ability to look back can help us appreciate where we are now.
The photographs we save today may become the windows through which a future version of ourselves—or someone we love—will someday look back at this moment.
We don’t know what that future person will see.
We don’t know what will matter to them.
We don’t know which ordinary Tuesday, family gathering, road trip, hug, laugh, or quiet moment will become precious.
But we can give them the opportunity to discover it.
And tomorrow I may believe differently.
My family and I spent a Mother’s Day weekend several hours from our home, during which we experienced a fierce wind storm, creating panic in our youngest sobbed “I don’t want to die!” as we tried to find our way back to the parking lot from our walk a couple of miles down the beach.
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Living the Little Moments (And Why My Blog Has Been Quiet)
You may have noticed that it’s been a while since I’ve added anything new here.
Life gets busy.
Summer trips happen. Family needs our help. Life events ask us to be fully present. Projects pile up. Sometimes the things we enjoy—including writing a blog—simply have to wait while we live the moments that matter most. I spend much of my time helping families with organizing photos, but this summer reminded me that before we organize our memories, we have to make them.
This summer took us to the Midwest to say a final goodbye to my husband’s mother. Along the way, we enjoyed long-overdue visits with extended family and dear friends. One unexpected gift from that trip was discovering a collection of photographs of my husband’s late father that no one knew existed. As someone who helps people preserve family memories, that felt especially meaningful. Those photographs arrived at exactly the right time.
Previously unseen family photos were recovered. Our travels also took us to Southern California to welcome a beautiful new granddaughter into the world. Between cuddling a newborn, helping entertain her energetic toddler brother, and watching our own children become parents, I was reminded once again how quickly one generation becomes the next.
Moments that I want to burn into my memory. There were long stretches of highway where my husband and I simply enjoyed being together. We explored places we’d never been, stood in awe of waterfalls, rivers, mountains, and beaches, watched wildlife with the curiosity of children, and found ourselves having conversations that wandered through the past, the present, and the future.
Some days were filled with rigorous hikes. Others were wonderfully quiet—like watching the clouds create stunning drama in the distance as we drove for hours across North Dakota with little else to distract. Or standing beside a lake, watching raindrops create ripples that stretched outward until they met other ripples. There were several perfect reminders that even the smallest moments can have a lasting impact.
And yes…we took plenty of photographs.
People live their lives every day, and sometimes life simply asks us to live it, trusting that we’ll organize the memories when things become a little quieter.
We don’t neglect our photos because we don’t care.
We neglect them because we’re busy living.
Every overflowing phone, every dusty box of printed photographs, every reel of film, and every stack of old home videos tells me the same story—not that someone failed, but that someone has lived a life full of moments worth remembering.
I have a confession to make: I still take far more photos than I need.
One thing my clients have taught me, though, is that only a fraction of those images become the photographs we’ll treasure years from now. The duplicates, the near-duplicates, and the ten attempts to capture the “perfect” shot can almost always be narrowed down to one.
Our story doesn’t need to be a frame-by-frame account of our lives.
The photographs that truly matter are the ones that make us feel something—the ones that instantly transport us back to a conversation, a laugh, a hug, or a season of life we never want to forget. Those are the images worth preserving for future generations.
I’m still working on breaking my own habit of taking too many photos, but I’ve become much better at curating the collection that will one day be passed on to our children.
Instead of leaving them thousands upon thousands of images to sort through, I want to leave them a thoughtfully organized collection of the people, places, and moments that helped shape our family’s story.
After all, they’ll have plenty of their own memories to preserve someday.
If there’s one thing this summer reminded me, it’s that preserving memories doesn’t begin with organizing photos—it begins with living a life worth remembering.
When the adventures settle down and you’re ready to make sense of the photos you’ve collected along the way, that’s where I love to help. Whether your memories live on your phone, in dusty boxes, or somewhere in between, my goal has never been just to organize pictures. It’s to help you preserve the stories they’ll tell long after today’s little moments have become tomorrow’s cherished memories.
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The Real Value of Photo Organizing and Preservation
One of the most common things I hear from people is this:
“I know I need to do something with my photos… I just haven’t gotten to it yet.”
And honestly, that makes perfect sense.
Life is expensive right now. Prices seem to rise faster than paychecks, and most of us are making constant decisions about where our time, energy, and money should go. We pay more for groceries, gas, utilities, and even simple nights out because those things are part of everyday life. We accept the cost because the need feels immediate.
But memory preservation is different.
The value is deeply emotional, while the urgency often feels invisible — until something happens.
Why So Many People Delay Organizing Photos
Ask someone to list the belongings they would save first in an evacuation, and photos, videos, and family keepsakes almost always rise to the top. These collections hold the stories of our lives: the people we love, the moments we never want to forget, the history future generations will never get back once it’s gone.
And yet, these treasured collections are often tucked away in closets, stored in aging albums, packed into bins, or scattered across phones, cloud accounts, CDs, DVDs, old computers, and external hard drives.
Not because people don’t care.
Usually, it’s because the project feels overwhelming.
The Emotional Weight of Memory Projects
There’s the emotional side of sorting through decades of memories. The time required to organize everything. Uncertainty about technology, storage, backup systems, scanning, digitization, and preservation. And for many people, there’s the quiet fear of making mistakes with items that cannot be replaced.
So the project gets postponed for “someday” — that future season of life when there will somehow be more time, more space, more energy, and fewer distractions.
But unfortunately, photos and media don’t always wait patiently for us.
Why Photo Preservation Matters
Printed photographs fade and deteriorate. VHS tapes, DVDs, slides, negatives, and aging hard drives become increasingly fragile. Digital files become scattered, duplicated, corrupted, or inaccessible as technology changes.
That’s why professional photo organizing and preservation services exist.
Not because people are incapable of doing it themselves, but because these projects are often emotionally heavy, technically confusing, time-consuming, and difficult to begin alone.
A professional photo manager isn’t simply sorting pictures into boxes or folders. They are helping preserve irreplaceable family history, protecting memories from loss, creating systems that families can actually maintain, and helping people reconnect with stories that matter deeply to them.
When viewed through that lens, the conversation shifts away from “What does this cost?” and toward “What is this worth to me — and what would it mean to lose it?”
For many families, the answer is: more than they realized.
Small Steps Make a Big Difference
The good news is that memory preservation does not have to happen all at once. Even small steps — organizing one box, scanning a small collection, backing up digital photos properly, labeling names and dates, or creating a simple system for future photos — can make an enormous difference over time.
Because preserving your memories is not really about organizing things.
It’s about protecting the people, stories, and moments that make up your life.
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I just came across my “bin” of photos again! I really need to get them organized, maybe this is what I need to get me motivated! VHS conversion is definitely of interest.
Hi Nancy! It’s a big task for sure! I will be sharing ways to get started in posts to come, as well as tips that will help make it less overwhelming. Reach out anytime!
Laurie, I wish you a great success with your idea.
Thank you so much, Jesus. I appreciate it!