I'd like to propose a new spiritual practice: remembering your life. Actively. Intentionally.

The ancient Hebrew community built so many of its practices around exactly this — remembrance, and the celebrating that came of it. Today it's so easy to plough straight through, never once looking back.

Maybe there's a comfort in that. We leave the hard stuff behind, no dwelling. But at what cost? What good are we letting slip past that we could be holding onto?

When I was out of work in 2022, I leaned into a hobby I'd never given much time but had always loved: making photo books. Building big family albums, one for each year, became like taking a breath of fresh air.

I'm someone who struggles to see the forest for the trees. Making these books shows me the forest. I see the stunning beauty of my life — the beauty that's so hard to see above the dishes and the diapers.

However you come at it, you land where I did: a deep, soul-level gratitude. To pull our eyes off other people's lives — their experiences, their families, their bodies — and set them on our own, to see as God sees, is a gift we give ourselves.

And it doesn't stop at gratitude. Looking back nudges me forward. When I see my own highlight reel, I get the itch for more — more memories, more days with my toes in the actual sand of my real, non-digital life.

Which makes sense — what we focus on expands. When we focus on the good and the beautiful — the hard still there, layered underneath — we grow in goodness and beauty too.

When I bring the photo books and home videos to my family, they join me in it. We laugh over toddler silliness. The kids get inspired — they'll decide to stage another basement play, like the one from that one summer.

I don't do as much photobooking now as I did when I was unemployed. But when I carve out the time — even a few minutes in — I feel something almost physically shift. I look at my kids differently. I sit a little less clenched.

Maybe for you it isn't photo books at all. Maybe it's scrolling your own digital albums instead of TikTok in the small pockets of a day. Or a "remembering date" with your partner — an evening to journal the past year's biggest moments together.

And here's what surprised me: the more I remember, the more I notice — not only in the albums, but in the middle of an ordinary afternoon. Looking back trains the eye to look. A camera helps with this, but only when I reach for it to see, not to post.

There's a line in Liane Moriarty's Apples Never Fall — a woman in her sixties, looking back:

When she looked at photos of her children when they were little, she sometimes thought, Did I notice how beautiful they were? Was I actually there? Did I just skim the surface of my entire damned life?

Remembering my life is how I dive in. No more skimming the surface.