We started with scattered notes. Post-its, files, messages. Words scribbled in the margins of days.
At some point, a question emerged—not just about how to organize it all, but about what any of it meant to us in the first place. What do we hold onto? What gets remembered, and why? Is it the urgency of a task, or the quiet weight of a feeling that won’t let go?
We tried to answer with systems: Notion pages, password vaults, project templates. But underneath the structure was something else—a deeper need to see what stays.
This is what brought us here: not just to the question of what we save, but of how we keep. How we keep track of what matters.
And how that act of keeping might be more than memory—maybe even a way of being.
What We Reach For First
Some things we reach for without thinking. A cup, a note, a password manager. Our phones. A friend.
What we reach for first doesn’t always mean it’s the most important. But it does tell us something about our needs. Our defaults. The filters we carry for what feels urgent. What feels comforting. We don’t just reach for things. We reach for what we expect to help.
And when something proves itself—when it meets us more than once—we start reaching again.
That’s how tools become habits, and how habits become memory. Not of an event, but of a pattern.
We don’t always remember why. But we remember that we reach, and what answers when we do.
What We Choose Not to Save
Some things pass through us and leave no mark. Others we notice, but don’t hold.
Not because they aren’t worth remembering, but because we don’t know how—or don’t feel the need—to save them.
Sometimes it’s practical. A forgotten password to a site we’ll never visit again. A half-formed idea that loses urgency by morning. A photo we almost took but didn’t.
Other times, the reasons are harder to name.
We let something go because it hurts. Because it asks more from us than we’re ready to give. Because it doesn’t seem to lead anywhere.
Then there’s the kind of saving that’s not saving. Keeping the object, but not the meaning. Filing the file, but losing the moment it mattered.
We don’t always know the difference until later. Sometimes we only recognize the weight of what we didn’t keep after it’s gone.
And sometimes—quietly, miraculously—it returns.
Not as data. Not as proof. But as something we still carry, unknowingly. A line of dialogue. A scent. A feeling in the chest. Alive again. Still with us.
That happened recently, during a quiet afternoon spent sorting books. One book came off the shelf, and the rest of philosophy seemed to follow. It wasn’t planned. It just happened—one reach led to another.
And with it, a soft wave of memory: A lecture playing on TV, the first time opening Purity of Heart, the slow circling of Fear and Trembling, the way reading turned into something else entirely.
None of it came to a clear conclusion. But maybe that’s what saved it—Not as an idea to cling to, but as a movement toward something.
And sometimes, the most honest way of keeping something is being willing to set it down.
The Medium Is the Memory
Memory isn’t just stored in the medium. It’s shaped by it.
Think about paper journals, Notion pages, voices on voicemails, body-sensations tied to a certain sweater or scent.
Music at different points in our lives.
There are different kinds of remembering. And sometimes, we remember differently depending on where or how we kept it. A note in a drawer feels different from the same sentence on a screen. One hums. The other waits.
I kept a note in the desk drawer of my childhood home for a while—written by a close friend from school.
They recalled something we had said once:
“Pretty soon, now will be then.”
Underneath it: “Be happy! :)”.
And, it’s like that. Memory can stretch and move through time, overlap. The fondest ones from decades ago carrying messages to you now.
Another one: RAM and ROM.
RAM memories stay close—immediate, adaptable, alive in the moment. ROM holds the deeper codes—older, more rooted. The ones that don’t just inform, but shape.
And sometimes it’s like that, too. Some memories are closed, meant to be read-only. We keep them because the keeping still matters. It’s not always for nostalgia’s sake, but sometimes it’s to remind us to keep going. To nudge us forward.
I don’t always know what I want to remember. But I know how I want to feel when I do.
I want it to feel lived-in. Textured.
Mine.
And maybe not just mine.
Rituals of Return
The first Opinel knife wasn’t dramatic. It was a simple gift.
I dropped it in my bag and forgot about it most days.
Then one afternoon at the airport, a TSA agent plucked it out like a magician pulling a rabbit from a hat, wagged their finger at me, and tossed it into a bin.
That was that. Loss, like all the other small ones.
But months later, another knife showed up.
Same shape. Same weight. Same quiet promise.
It wasn’t just my pocket knife anymore. It was part of a thread someone else had tied back into my hands without needing to say a word.
It was still mine. But not just mine.
(And sometimes the things that return carry more than we realize at first—like hearing an old ABBA riff humming under a Madonna song years later.)
And that’s what happens with some of the things we keep.
They start as private anchors—small markers of where we’ve been, who we were. But over time, some of them pick up other meanings. Other hands. A memory hums differently when someone else has touched it too, even if they don’t say it out loud.
Not everything we keep is just ours.
Some things live better—truer—because they crossed through someone else’s care first.
What We’re Still Holding Onto (and Don’t Know Why)
Not every memory wants to be kept neatly filed away. Some things linger differently—half-forgotten, half-claimed.
Some things we’re still holding onto, even when we don’t fully understand why.
Memories don’t always settle into clear categories. They don’t always declare themselves important or slip quietly into forgetfulness. They’re just there.
An old ticket stub. A song you can’t explain crying over. A name that still pulls something in your chest years later.
We don’t always know why we’re keeping them. Sometimes they feel like loose ends. Some like anchors to a self we’re not sure we recognize anymore.
But maybe part of keeping track of what matters is allowing some things to remain unfinished. To trust that not everything we hold needs to make sense right away. Or even ever.
Sometimes, the memories keep us —long before we realize we’ve been carrying them for a reason.
Someone within earshot says an ordinary word—a color, a day, a street name—and your body hears it differently. Like a door creaking open in a place you don’t even realize you had locked.
You don’t say anything. You don’t need to. The world just shifted a bit, and you caught it. The way a song you forgot you loved finds you again, stitched into a set played for strangers.
You don’t step all the way through that open door. But you know it’s there, however quietly. And that’s enough.
Closing
We don’t always know why we keep what we do. Why some memories stay stitched into us, even when the reasons slip away. But maybe that’s part of keeping track of what matters. Not to pin it down. Not to master it. But to keep humming with the echoes.
We trust that some things return because they’re still shaping us, even now. And maybe that’s what keeping is: an act of faith in the things that come back to stay.
For the moment, that’s enough.