I’d been exercising on the beach at 5:30 am when I ran into a man carrying a bag of trash in one hand and a metal detector in the other. We were the only souls within earshot of the breaking waves.

“Are you finding some cool stuff?” I asked.

He looked at me warily and allowed a little nod.

“I’ll bet you have some amazing stories to tell,” I added.

That was the unlock. He smiled as I watched pleasant memories flood his mind.

For forty years, he told me, he’s been visiting popular beaches on Monday mornings to scan the sand where humans sun, surf, and play. Inevitably, valuables get left behind.

“You must have found some amazing things over the years,” I remarked.

He reached into a leather pouch around his waist and pulled out 3 gold rings.

“I’m up to 7 gold rings this year,” he told me. “56 in one year is my record. I once found a ring that had 3 rubies, 5 sapphires, and 47 diamonds. We do our best to find the original owners,” he told me, explaining the code of ethics he and other finders adhere to.

After scouring lost and found websites the world over, he was finally able to locate the owner of that prize ring. She’d been vacationing from Austria when it slipped off her finger on North American shores. He shipped it back to her on the other side of the world.

“I’m so inspired by your integrity,” I told him.

He could see how enthralled I was by his stories and was shining now with pride.

He paused, perhaps wondering if he wanted to go on, but the welling of emotion in his eyes involuntarily took charge of his speech.

A woman once approached him holding a silver chain in her hand on this same beach. She had been swimming weeks earlier when it fell off her neck into the sea. She recovered the chain, but had lost the pendant.

“I know it’s probably gone forever,” she said, “but might you look?”

He ventured into the waves with a detector designed for the surf and 30 minutes later it chimed over the pendant in the muck. He pulled it out, held it high, and waded back to shore where the woman broke down in sobs. It was a silver heart containing the ashes of her son that she had kept inches from her own heart for years.

“Tears of joy from people who get parts of their lives back are a thousand times more rewarding than anything else,” he said.

I thanked him for his stories and headed back to my car.

It occurred to me that human stories are much the same as keys, coins, or treasured objects that get left behind in the sand. The recovery of them reconnects us to our riches.

Reuniting others with forgotten and buried stories gets me out of bed each day for the same reason this man has been sifting sand for the last 40 years.

It’s why I started The Memoir Project, to support ordinary people to successfully recover treasure of experience they’ve left behind.

I’m hosting some free open sessions to talk about how memoir isn’t a stuffy, literary, end-of-life display of tragedies or accomplishments, but a discovery process that can turn your past into a future you’ll love.

If you’d like to join one of those conversations, just reply, “save me a spot.”