A couple earthquakes ago, the pavement in our backyard buckled to the point that we’d become the not-proud owners of way too many tripping hazards. The dogs managed the unevenness just fine, but us humans did not. We did a little planning, searched through online pictures of backyards, and unearthed landscape designs that we’d paid for in full but left abandoned before completion five years previous.

Finally, last summer we* ripped out the most unstable section of concrete which included the area around our forty year old magnolia tree. We needed to trim back some of the roots so that future earthquakes and tree growth wouldn’t quickly de-stabilize everything again. Careful excavation of soil and other plant debris revealed a gorgeous web of roots that undulated outward from the trunk. It was breathtaking. It wasn’t like strands combed out, laying one next to the other, but tangles of thick and thin wooden waves going round and round each other, coming up for air then disappearing back down into the earth.

I thought to myself: I should take a picture. When would I ever see this again?

Then I thought to myself: I don’t want to take a picture. I want to remember this. (The photo in this post is from Unsplash.)

And that’s how I’ve approached memorable moments for years now, even as my boys are growing up and maybe soon, one will be heading out. I don’t want to be looking through a lens at my life, I want to live my life. I don’t want to relentlessly document it. If I have 100,000 pictures of my children, if I’m compelled to memorialize every notable experience I have, then later would I even remember the experience? Or would I instead remember the memorializing of the experience? If I’m trying to take a great picture of a meaningful moment, doesn’t that change the moment itself?

I’ve still ended up with a lot of pictures in my phone. Screenshots, art references, art documenting, memes, color samples, and lots of lots of pictures of my dogs. (By the way, self: Why do I take more pictures of my dogs than of my own kids?**) If I try to make a “this is our family” photo collage to send out at the end of a year and get irritated at myself for not taking more pictures of my boys, it still doesn’t make me want to change my infrequent snapping of personal life photos.

I don’t want to hold my life experiences in digital files. I feel more connected to these memories when I don’t have to look at a picture of “that one time”. I want to keep them safe in my heart and mind— the places that seem the safest— where no one can take them and they can’t get lost. I want to keep them where they can be rooted for safekeeping, always within close reach for as long as my mind is able.

~ mrk

P.S. I have nearly 30,000 digital photos in my library and over 1000 videos. Noting this, in case I am leaving the impression that I’m a minimalist. In case the P.S. and the footnotes didn’t already make that clear.

* All related we’s regarding this labor refers not to us having actually done the labor ourselves, but to our having planned it and hired out for it and other non-back breaking, non-skilled aspects of the project. And to convey this home improvement story in the tradition of ignoring & overlooking† the contributions made by the actual people who did the actual work. Also so that we might appear to be very handy and industrious.

** I have lots of ideas as to why this might be, and most serve to justify to others and myself that this doesn’t mean I love my extremely-cute-not-very-thought-provoking dogs more than I love my best-parts-of-my-life-even-when-they-make-me-crazy teenage sons. Because, you know, justifying myself is a skill I have honed over the years.‡

† I’m being sarcastic. :)

‡ Also maybe sarcastic, but also true, but also, ok, whatever. Fine!