One sunny, lazy day out in Japan and having fun at visiting some flea markets in nearby Kobe, I happened to stumble across an old petroleum lamp at one of the antique stalls. It was made from copper with a kind of golden glass and a train sign drawn at one edge. And instantly, standing there with my fidgeting daughters at my side, I was transported back to my childhood, when I was just five or six. I didn't even consciously remember this kind of lamp - I would have drawn a blank had you described it to me or also asked me if I had owned one. But when it was before me, those neural pathways in my brain sprang to life again, and its form was magically familiar.

It's an exciting sensation and one that many have experienced at some point. Discover an artifact from your past and be carried back into memoirs you had no idea you still had. The colors, print, or texture in a mundane item can be so reassuringly familiar that it feels like time travel - the years slipping back to when this ordinary object was a part of your small world.

Photographs have this ability, too. And what I found, when digging again through my archive, was that it was seldom the distinct and modeled photographs that brought this magic to life. There were so many of these my brother and sister and I in Carnival costumes or our best dresses at Christmas or Easter times against a living room curtain or wall. Portraits - taken to be send to family members or in capturing a childhood milestone.

Nearly all of these images are portraits or holiday snaps at well-known tourist spots, family photos with smiling faces at specific gatherings. They're precious in different ways, but it's the incidentals that bring about that intuitive, subtle sensation of rewinding the clock. The pattern of a tapestry, a toy just in the shot at the side of a frame, maybe it's a trouser I'm wearing that I can suddenly recall, perhaps it's the glance of a relative and the kind smiles we paste on for the images. In every case, it's the petty details of everyday life, that hold the most memories. We tend to remember the big days, first school day, university, army, or alike. These are more or less the memories we revisit as we grow. Stories we tell friends and loved ones as the years go by.

Seldom do we stop to recall the pattern of a carpet or the smell of the apples we picked one hot autumn day. These are the fabric of our stories, though. Train your mind and your eyes to look for the precious in your everyday life. What do you want to remember, twenty years from now? What would go into a time capsule of your daily life? And then, reach for your camera. The plan is not to be perfect. It's not to keep every photo forever. Make it an experiment in noticing, in being present. This might be the beginning of a new Instagram journey.

Visual culture [time capsule]