What Matters Most

Wow, it's been a while since I've written anything. I was talking to my dad yesterday. He lost his home in the Southern California Fires last month. The only thing he was able to salvage was a clay hand print of my brother Olin. He lost everything else. As we were talking, he said to me: "What's really important are family and pictures and personal things. Don't ever forget that." He then, in the course of the conversation mentioned the fires that have been going on in Malibu over the last few days. He said that all those nice homes are gone, but that "the most important things for those people are that they are alive and that their friends still care about them."

This really got me thinking about what I'm doing to build up relationships both within my own family, with my friends, and with those I interact with day by day. It also got me thinking about those "pictures and personal things" that are of significance to me. Am I backing things up in such a way that I will have pictures of family and friends if something were to happen? (Everything from a natural disaster like a fire, or something less severe, and more likely, like a computer failure.)

Most of my pictures I have taken are on the computer, as I have a digital camera. This conversation with my dad, has helped motivate me to back them up, as well as to label them with information such as when and where each picture was taken, as well as names of those photographed. Perhaps, for a temporary solution, I'll burn my pictures to DVDs. I'll also be sure that they are backed up on an external hard drive or another computer periodically. As far as older family photos go, that are not yet digitally preserved, I am going to start scanning some of them in, so that, if nothing else, I have a backup to the originals. This won't happen overnight, but I feel that it is important, and that it will be beneficial to me, as well as to other family members and to those who come after me.

As far as keeping a journal and personal letters, cards, etc. I've always wanted to type up my handwritten journal entries, so perhaps that is a project I should sta Currently I try to type my journal entries, and every now and then I email the word file to myself to back it up.

The other thing that I feel is important to save, and back up in some way, is contact information for family and friends. This is a hard one. It is difficult to keep current contact info for those that you know and care about, but it's important. I try to keep my address book on my computer as up to date as I can, and then I'll back the file up in various formats, and email the files to myself. I should probably print out a hard copy at least annually so that I have something physical in case I don't have access to a computer.

Anyway, the conversation with my dad just kind of sparked some of these ideas for me, and made them a little more vivid as to their importance. Because, as he said: "Everything else can be replaced." Therefore, I want to try to organize those things that cannot be replaced and back them up in such a way that, if something were to happen to the originals, I would still have those things that matter most--the pictures, letters, journal entries, and, most importantly, the ability to contact the people I love.