On January 1st, 2018, I began a project that would begin to change the way I now look at my life. It began as a New Year’s resolution—something I thought would be a fun way to document what was going on in my life. I downloaded the One Second Everyday app with the intent of video-journaling my year, and while it allows me to accomplish that, it has been teaching me a lesson that I didn’t know I needed.

The way the app works is that every day, I choose a moment to record a one-second video clip that I later upload into the video calendar pictured above. When I press play, the app compiles each of these segments into a whole video with the date when each was taken in the bottom corner. These videos can be started and ended whenever, but I decided I wanted to capture the entirety of 2018.

Some days, I have plans that make for exciting and aesthetically pleasing videos. But more often than not, my days aren’t filled with moments I would normally deem photo-worthy. The videos I have taken so far range from incredible shots of the Hawaiian Islands from an airplane to boring shots of notes from intense homework sessions. Sometimes, I will accidentally forget to record, but it isn’t the end of the world if I skip a day. After all—365 video clips is a lot to take in.

As I am around 10 months into this project, I can say that it has trained my mind to seek out the significance in my daily life. Whereas before I started this project, I would normally go through my days waiting for the ones where I had big plans, I noticed how I began looking forward to the little things that were apart of my constant routine. Times like lunch at school and grocery shopping with my mom had now become moments that I began to record and appreciate.

I found that there were moments worth capturing in every day—in both the high points and the low points. On good days, there are several, and on bad days, I am always able to find at least one thing that I see as meaningful. This project has taught me to look for the good in every day, because it is always there, waiting for me to notice it. It has taught me to notice the moments I often zoom past, drawing my attention to the value of the mundane and the beauty that hides within it.

As I look back, I noticed that almost all of my videos so far capture at least one of these two things: people and places. The moments that I felt were most worthy of my appreciation had in common the two elements of my life that I have always been surrounded by. Nothing changed about my life when I started this project; it taught me to observe the significance of what I already had. The One Second Everyday app is simply a tool that opened my eyes to the sources of joy in my life, and at the end of the year, I am going to have a video that will remind me of exactly that every time I watch it.

Update made on April 3rd, 2019 // The video from 2018 is complete! Watch below:

Photo Credits: Ava Dunwoody