Life is Fleeting: Photograph It!

I have taken pictures of EVERYTHING for the longest time, but ESPECIALLY since I was able to get a digital camera in August 2003. Even such silly things as what we are eating on a day we go out to eat, I photograph it--and I've been doing this LONG before Instagram & the like made it fashionable. People would stare at me, but I cared not the least--and still don't (and I still only use a REAL camera even for such things, as I mentioned in an earlier post).

Why do I like to take pictures of everything that way? A little perspective helps.

As I continue to experience the ups & downs of life, and as the years pile on at age 43, I am more aware than ever of how fleeting life is, how many things change. People who are younger don't always appreciate this, or understand why those of us who are older mumble about these sorts of things--they think we're having another "delusional flashback." The thing is this: you can so easily remember when things were different than the way that they are in the present, all the (often-times) positive experiences you had at those times, and you can't escape being aware of the discrepancy between what was then vs what is now.

The way it was, but will never be again: me (far left)
age 15, with my cousins, May 1984

Those cousins you use to do so much with as a child: now, many of them hardly acknowledge that you're even alive. Even those that do, whenever you try & have a "reunion" & re-experience those fun times again, it often-times doesn't "take." Or, you will visit them, but with their new life being what it is, you merely visit for a bit only to "catch up," nothing more--and just like that, the thrill is gone, the initial excitement replaced by a sense of emptiness. It's not the same, and often-times even if you go in with an open mind not expecting it to be exactly the same, you're still shocked at just how different it really is.

Yes many of us realize the eternal of the afterlife, but the life here & now is hardly irrelevant (else why have it occur to start with?), and it can be such a jar to the emotions and thinking to see these things happen in your life first-hand.

In a photograph, you can easily flashback to this period and remember it--and, in your mind anyway, re-live it.

Back in 1978-1984, when I was 9-13 years of age, certain cousins of mine & I used to go once a year every year to a lake in eastern NC about 2 hours where we lived. We stayed in a quaint cabin and enjoyed the arcades, rides, the lake itself, and the video games on the Atari my aunt rigged up to the TVs they had there. I can remember that crazy "flash rifle" game where you pointed a rifle whose "bullets" were bursts of flash lights and if you hit the target, different silly things happened. They had a sign saying "no flash cameras" for obvious reasons (everything would've gone off at once), a rule we obviously took great pleasure in breaking. We used to just cut up & have such fun.Those were absolutely some of the funnest times I have ever experienced in my life.Heck, even the car rides on the way there, especially the early years when we'd ride in the back of my aunt's small Toyota with a camper-shell & do such things as squirt packets of mustard onto the road & flip off the drivers behind us, were just hilariously entertaining.

Us In December 2003 for a 3rd anniversary trip, back to where we
went to start with on our honeymoon.

Yet, even before it was over, by 1984, when I was now 15, you could tell it was now starting to change, to not be the same anymore. We were becoming teenagers more enamored with who we could be friends with in high-school, we were becoming interested in guys & girls, and didn't want to be "weighed down" by our "un-hip relatives" in pursuing our own interests. We certainly didn't want to be confined to our parents' world in it, especially.

The magical era of that 1978-1984, which our parents worked so hard to make for us, was fading into irrelevance & there wasn't a thing anyone could (or should) do about any of it.

That is how life works, and I am well aware of it. We currently are a source of entertainment for our nieces & nephews, ages 6-9, and I draw a lot of parallels between that vs the fun I had with my cousins, during this period & otherwise, when I was growing up. I take LOTS of photographs of the occasion, well aware that one day, these same nieces & nephews will now only think of us in past-tense terms, "I remember when we used to have so much fun at your house." With photographs helping us, we will look back on those photographs & remember, with everything around us now totally different, when things were that way.

My cousins whom I used to experience those fun times with, and many other fun times with: I haven't spoken to any of them in any meaningful way in probably 20-odd years. No one necessarily did anything wrong, personalities and circumstances just changed as time went on. Only 5 years after that last 1984 trip, with me now 20 years old and one of my cousins around 18, this cousin & I went back there with her now boyfriend, and it wasn't anywhere the same. None of us have ever been back there with any of the others ever since. No one has called me up or even emailed saying "if you're ever in NC again, we should all go back there again just for old time's sake."

Not once.

Yet, on the rare occasion any of us are talking to the other & that period of time comes up, you can just hear and see the faces smiling. We have never forgotten, even if the experiences can't be re-lived. And, this is my main point: at any time, I can pull up photographs I took during that period (I took some the last 2 years when I finally owned my own camera) and see it and experience it all over again. I can be immediately transformed to that 9-13 year old pimply-faced person I was and to the persons my cousins, parents and aunts etc were at that time, as if time had never passed.

Things change: our daughter Helen in May 2007, April 2012

I figure, as time goes on, these nieces-nephews who are SO enamored with us now will go through a similar phase of wanting to distance themselves from us that way as they enter teenage years & start to become people in their own right, no longer wanting to simply be part of the world that their brothers & sisters and we as the aunt & uncle occupy--and when this happens, it will forever be altered, and this period of time which we currently enjoy with them will become a fading memory.

So, those photos we are taking of them now--they not only serve as a source of joy now, they will serve as a priceless reminder of that long-ago period when the years catch up & smash this era into the long-ago past of yesteryear. I am 43; in 20 years, I will be a 63 year old man. My mother-in-law is nearly 70, my father-in-law about 56; 20 years from now, I figure my mother-in-law, who is a VERY central figure in the lives of those kids now, will be deceased by then, or if she's alive still, in VERY frail condition. My father-in-law will be similarly rendered unable to move about much anymore, and be prone to sitting around talking a lot, and photos of this period will be priceless to him at this time. The child's parents will be in their mid 40's or so by this time, and will be going through a very emotional "my babies are growing up and leaving me" period as she sees her kids move away, possibly even out-of-state, and no longer have their lives centered around her.

This is the way it's SUPPOSED to be--I'm not supposed to still be in that lake in NC trying to make it still be the way it was 1978-1984. I'm making my own memories now, with people from all walks of life, people my long-lost cousins could give a rip about. My life now is about my wife, and what we do with our kids.

Even so, yes--one day, THAT will change for us as well. All those great photos of me & Helen enjoying each other with the tire swing--one day, it will be irrelevant, except as a past memory. All those silly things I do with Adrian, he's going to no longer want any part of it anymore.

That's life. But even though life will change and SHOULD change, there's nothing wrong with wanting to capture the essence of that period of time, so you can remember and cherish it as time goes on.

When you realize how fleeting life is, you don't waste a moment. I'm typing this on a Monday morning, after recovering from a virus-created illness that had me bed-ridden yesterday. I was very upset about this: my brother-in-law had intended to go enjoy a cliff-diving swimming hole and make more memories about that, but the illness rendered me unable to. One day, the 2 of us won't be doing that anymore, for whatever reason--I may age and not be mobile enough while he still is, he may get in an accident that does this to him, he (or we) may move away. You want to make these memories as much as you can and you don't ANYTHING, not even a non-preventable 24-hour virus, to get in the way of it.

So--while you still can, PHOTOGRAPH your life. PHOTOGRAPH your 3 year old son with cake batter on his face. PHOTOGRAPH your mother on her 50th birthday while she is still vital & not yet succumbed to aging enough to be "rocking chair bound." Because one day, all of that you see will no longer be, and you will want to remember it it all--because, otherwise, why did any of it happen to start with?