A while back, I was flipping through an old month in my planner.

I wasn’t looking for anything in particular.

There were appointments, things I needed to remember, projects I was working on and the usual collection of notes that made perfect sense to me when I wrote them.

And scattered among all of that were little things.

Book Club.

Thursday Evening Café.

Lunch with a friend.

Dog grooming.

Nothing particularly noteworthy.

Certainly nothing you’d circle at the beginning of the month and say, “This is going to be one of the important parts.”

But looking back, those were some of the things that told me what that month had actually been like.

Not the appointments.

Not the things I checked off.

The life happening around them.

That got me thinking about how differently we look at a calendar depending on which direction we’re facing.

When we’re looking ahead, we see what needs to happen.

When we’re looking back, we see what did happen.

Those aren’t always the same thing.

The appointment written neatly in Tuesday’s square may have taken 45 minutes.

The conversation afterward may have stayed with us for weeks.

Lunch with a friend gets one little line on the calendar.

It doesn’t show the two hours of talking and laughing.

“Book Club” doesn’t tell you which conversation sent everyone off in a completely different direction from the book.

“Dog grooming” certainly doesn’t tell you anything except that somebody came home looking considerably better than when they left. 😂

A calendar is very good at keeping track of time.

It’s not particularly good at keeping track of life.

Maybe that’s why I’ve become increasingly interested in the little things we leave behind.

A note in the margin.

A photograph we almost didn’t take.

A recipe written in someone’s handwriting.

A story we’ve heard so many times that nobody thinks to write it down.

The silly thing someone said at dinner that became a family saying.

The ordinary places we once went all the time.

The sound of someone’s voice.

The way a particular house smelled.

None of those things seem particularly important while they’re happening.

Until someday they are.

I think about that a lot when I write about my own family.

There are big stories, of course.

But some of the memories I most want to preserve aren’t big at all.

They’re ordinary.

They’re the details that tell me not just what happened, but what it felt like to be there.

Sometimes it’s one tiny detail.

The sound of my dad’s whistle calling us in at night.

My mom, out in the rain in a cast and on crutches, trying to get the sheep back into their enclosure—because apparently neither a broken leg nor bad weather was enough to convince her those sheep could wait. 😂

My baby brother telling me about his first kiss.

None of those moments would have made anyone’s list of important family events.

But I would give almost anything to step into one of them again for five minutes.

That’s the funny thing about memories. We don’t always know which details are going to matter while we’re living them.

Maybe that’s why I’ve started looking at my planner differently too.

Yes, I still need it to tell me where I’m supposed to be next Thursday.

That’s rather important. 🤣

But sometimes I also want it to remind me where I’ve been.

Not just what I accomplished.

Who was there?

What made me laugh?

What surprised me?

What did we talk about?

What happened that I don’t want to forget?

Because I suspect that someday, when I look back at this part of my life, I won’t care very much whether I finished everything on Tuesday’s to-do list.

I’ll want to remember the people who sat around the table.

The projects that excited me.

The books we talked about.

The dogs underfoot.

The conversations that went longer than expected.

The ordinary Saturdays.

The things that seemed so normal at the time that I almost forgot to notice them.

We need the plans.

They help us remember appointments, keep promises and make room for the things that matter.

But maybe we need to leave a little room in the margins too.

Because that’s often where the part we’ll want to remember gets written.

The life between the plans.