I come from a time when you made memories. Good or bad, occurrences stored of experiences lived, in our mind and the soul. Pictures are moments frozen in time, a calling to the heart when time allows you to review them invoking that moment back to life. They didn’t happen every day. Just the big days on the calendar. Not every event found itself in the nebula of the cloud, ephemera beneath the mask of immortality.
We forgo experience for documentation. Like personal historians, we save for posterity the minutiae and mute the impact of the seminal. Hidden behind the lens, we disconnect from the moment and celebrate the hallmarks from a safe distance. A memory made for sharing and a barrier from the formative effect as we float through a diminished living.
Remember, recollect, recall, and relive. Don’t be afraid to let life leave its imprint on you. Allow it, be the vessel of experience, don’t channel your life through a proxy. Memories are yours. Don’t fear the living that creates them. Don’t place a veil between your life and it’s projective image.
I ask how much will you remember when you document it as it happens? How much will it stir your soul? When you are eighty, are you going to relive the moment looking at your Instagram story, your facebook feed? I question our connection to our own lives. When we put an instrument between the lens of our own eyes, we disconnect ourselves from the moment and disassociate from our personal experience.
I remember memory and celebrate its organic ability to have us traveling the timeline of our lives. To experience our joys, fears, embarrassments, failures, heartbreak, and our own heart again within ourselves will never be replaced by a pale artificial imitator. Never separate you from your living. Remember memory.