Remember your life

Home is not static but a transient thing that can change depending on your current place. Although for some people, there might only be a single home, some people have multiple and it’s not a single thing. For me, I have 2 homes; 

  1. Where I live now with my perfect wife and;
  2. Home, home aka My parent’s house where I spent the first 19 years of my life in Tamworth, NSW

Sometimes I look back through my photos and videos and notice that where I spent 99% of my time at home 1 or 2, I have the least amount of footage. The large amount of my collection comes from travel and trips away from my regular living place. I think this is such a shame because as soon as your home starts to shift and you move away from it you’re missing a lot of these nostalgic places because at the time you were living there the thinking is like “oh well, I live here so I can see and do that whenever I want”. But then you might never end up making the memories or any footage. 

With this revelation I spent some time in my home 2 ensuring I can capture some footage so I can easily remember these important places in my life.

Compiling My Home Movies

Tamworth Bike Ride 2021

Tamworth Trail Running - Flagstaff Mountain

Tamworth - My Favourite Childhood Tree

Tamworth - Old Rugby Videos

Coming soon…. Home 2

One of the main things I wanted to get out of creating a blog was a way to autobiograph-ise my life. I like dates, timestamps and visuals – so I went in search of something of the Timeline variety to record, remember and relive my life. After all, my biggest fear is to look back on my life and regret not doing enough. 

I stumbled upon an amazing, innovative site Knightlab which is all free to use their templates on Storytelling – Timelines and Storylines being my 2 favourites. 

Hours upon hours of my time went into the creation of this:

  1. Planning – design, template dates, highlights, databases, storage, naming conventions, etc
  2. Scouring my Memories – Looking through photos (Google Photos is a great tool), memories, talking with friends for memories, old photo albums and others to pull out the moments in my life that I want to look back on and remember. Those critical moments where I achieved or learned something amazing. Or just something funny happened.
  3. Putting it all together – writing the memoirs, making the short highlights videos, uploading everything, ensuring everything works and the main point, redoing it all every (year?) to keep it up to day.

Without further adieu, the Timeline of Ross Michell until the end of 2020 (as of time of writing).

Timeline of Ross Michell

Again, I would strongly recommend everyone to find your own way to record, remember and relive your own life. This last few weeks has been a saviour with COVID lockdowns coming back into Sydney, it has helped me reconnect with people and myself looking back on these memories and learnings.

“…After all, these are not the memoirs of an empress, nor of a queen. These are memoirs of another kind.” – Memoirs of a Geisha