keep a debit of unhappy memories which will cancel out
the happy ones.
Here's how to start and operate your own
MEMORY BANK:
( 1) Start now. Today! Don't put it off another
day.
( 2) Keep a written record of your pleasant
memories, supplemented by photographs, picture post
cards, descriptive folders, menus of outstanding restaurants
where you have dined, even match-book covers and other
mementos. Don't depend on your memory. You'll surely
forget dates, names, places-even entire events. And you
will forget increasingly as you grow older, which is exactly
when you will have the most time and the most need for
all the happy memories you can acquire. The best way to
keep all this miscellaneous assortment of notes, folders,
menus, and other mementos is in a scrapbook. Not in a file.
Files are excellent for segregating papers by dates and sub-
jects-but the joy of a scrapbook Memory Bank is in the
browsing and the little surprises of discovering again some
happy event of the past which you had forgotten.
(3) Go back over your past-now-and re-
trieve, note down and paste in your Memory Bank scrap-
book all the happy occasions you can remember. Don't
delay. Your happy memories are golden. They are much
too valuable to trust to a human mind, the capacity of
which to recall past events fades with every passing day.
( 4 ) Then keep your written deposits in your
Memory Bank up to date. Don't let them accumulate again
until it becomes a project. Keep the feeling that making a