We call it the blur.
What’s that?
Take a quick look back at the last three months of your life.
What do you actually remember?
Without checking your calendar, do you recall what you did on a random Thursday three weeks ago?
Or do you mostly remember the moments that broke the pattern: the trips, the adventures, the weird little detours, or the spontaneous decisions?
As our daughter has grown from a baby to a toddler to a rising 9th grader, we’ve been thinking a lot about how life appears in the rearview mirror.
And we can’t help but notice a pattern.
Most of what we might call “normal life” dissolves into a kind of blur: an out-of-focus montage of work meetings, grocery runs, traffic, errands, email, dishes, and logistics that blend together into a monotonous mental landscape.
What’s left?
Those rare experiences that mark time.
These are the moments that interrupt the normal and break out of the blur.
The spur-of-the-moment weekend trip.
The concert that stretched the budget but you went to anyway.
The camping trip where you slept under the stars.
The date night when you tried something new and laughed like teenagers.
Without these time markers, vast stretches of life get swallowed up into the blur. And there’s a real risk of looking back and thinking:
Wait… what did we actually do with the last few months? The last few years? The last few decades?
So how do you interrupt the blur?
You mark time.
Here are two ways to do it.
1. Disrupt Normal
The blur feeds on normalcy. It loves routine and habit. It rejoices in the day-to-day.
So if you want to interrupt the blur, you have to begin by breaking out of normal.
Novelty is the key.
You can buy it by spending on vacations, dinners out, concerts, classes, or big events.
But you can also get it for free. You can experience novelty picnicking in a park, exploring a new trail, watching the sunrise, or ditching the last two hours of work on an ordinary Tuesday. Buy it or get it for free. Just make sure that it breaks you out of normal.
You don’t even have to leave the house to get this taste of novelty. You could learn to cook Lebanese food together, try something new in the bedroom, or paint a wildly mediocre work of abstract modernism together on a blank canvas in the driveway.
The point is this. Novelty breaks the blur. It creates a dent in time.
2. Hack Your Memory System
The blur is strong. So strong, in fact, that it will eventually swallow up even the most novel, disruptive, and spontaneous experiences you create.
To test this, ask: “What was my biggest highlight seven years ago?”
If you’re like us, you first have to do a little mental math to figure out that seven years ago was 2019. Then you scan the archives of your mind and mostly find…static.
A few memories. A few big moments. And a whole lot of blur.
That’s why marking time isn’t just about creating experiences. It’s also about preserving them.
We do this by putting together a yearly 10-minute family video. It includes clips from vacations, milestones, funny moments, big events, and small but memorable moments. Then, we watch these videos a few times a year.
After creating 14 of these videos (one for each year of our daughter’s life), we’ve begun to realize that, without them, we would have lost many of the key moments of her childhood.
These events stand out from the blur, not because we were there when they happened, but because we have now watched them so many times that they have been encoded deep into memory.
The yearly video is what works best for us. But you might have some other way of capturing these moments that mark time.
You could make a photo book, a printed album, a shared notes file, a yearly essay, a scrapbook, or a “best of the year” slideshow.
The goal is simple. When you mark the moments that marked time, you save them from the blur.