We all have those moments — the rare ones so saturated with personal significance and impact, so rich in meaning and relevance that we want to savor them, to save them, to put them in a jar. The Moment Jars offers just that — a lovely record of being human.

The brainchild of four creatives from the advertising and design industries — writer Mark Freid, designers Jeff Matz and Paul Mastriani, and illustrator Kim Foxbury — the project is a digital repository for people’s most monumental moments, offered without context or explanation in their rawest, purest form.

Candid and deeply personal, the moments range from the questionable (shooting a moose) to the mundane yet inexplicably memorable (a foggy day in San Diego) to the expected (lots of babies, lots of first kisses). The latter — an overwhelming majority — strip life of its pretense and illustrate a simple truth: The moments we often dismiss as the most contrived cliches are actually the ones that move us most powerfully and memorably

The Moment Jars is a bittersweet reminder that even the best of moments pass us by, living on only as ephemeral ghosts in the treasure chest of our memory.

The team (of The Wishing Machine fame) is immortalizing the moments in a limited-edition 22-page illustrated book, which you can buy right here.

You can also add your own moment to the chronological archive of several hundred jars, with moments dating as far back as 1920.

via Swiss Miss

Correction: We got a lovely note of gratitude from Mark, who kindly pointed out that the book is actually based on a short story he’d written some time ago titled, unsurprisingly, The Moment Jars. The team is, however, toying with the idea of doing more with the moments people submitted and considering another book based on them.