The Authentic Memory

I'm turning 52 next week, and I have to say I'm completely happy that I got to live my 20-something years during the 1980's.  Especially because the 1980's were the ending years of the unplugged life, right before hand-held electronics made their way into our moment-by-moment lives.

Of course it was a pain in the ass to have to locate a pay phone if you wanted to make a call, or to miss an important message because you were away from your phone, or to be unable to share good (or bad) news or a funny picture until you got home from a concert or a vacation.  But I can honestly say that during those wild, romantic, youthful years of my 20's, I was completely present where I was, doing whatever I was doing at the time, with no distractions --  no screens, no feeds and no statuses to check.

Think peak moments.  In my 20's, I had many, often in the presence with great friends or romantic partners.  We might be standing on the edge of a continent in Greece, enjoying a cup of coffee and scones at a tiny coffee shop on the foggy California coast, or witnessing a spectacular lightning storm perched on a hill in our car on a stormy late summer night in the midwest.

I experienced those moments in their totality, with whomever I was with and the gestalt of everything; the sights, the smells, the sounds and the emotions.  And even now, 30 years later, sometimes I catch a scent of jasmine, the sound of the ocean or the boom of distant thunder, and all those memories come flooding back to me, unbidden.  And they are welcome.  They bring back long-lost friends, places that no longer exist, and a time when life was a lot simpler and more innocent.

Fast forward to today, where every important moment is captured, pixelated and immediately shared. It's a huge loss, because in order to capture that moment, you must, by necessity, step away from it -- leave the real-time sights, sounds and sweeping feelings of that exact moment, in order to turn your cell phone on to camera setting, frame your shot, click away for a minute, and then get on the internet, log into Facebook or your address book and post it for everyone to see.  

It's like the time I agreed to photograph the Space Shuttle landing at Edwards Air Force Base in California.  I did my job, but ended up seeing the whole landing not simply looking up at the sky, but by squinting, one-eyed, through the viewfinder of my camera.  And I felt the loss when it was all over, because although I had the images captured on film, I missed watching the landing with my own two eyes.  I was so busy fiddling with focus, f-stop and aperture I missed the thrill of watching a spaceship come down from the sky and land.

And so it is today.  If you're standing on the edge of a volcano and have to start fiddling with your cell phone to capture and post an image, you've just diminished the primitive thrill of the volcano experience for yourself, while attempting to preserve it.

I see it at the winery all the time.  People ask me to take their picture, then spend the next 10 minutes trying to get a decent cell signal out of the winery so they can "check in" and post their photo.  And in those minutes they lose, they also lose the flow of the moment and the magic of the experience with their friends, a summer breeze and a glass of wine.

It's something I can't stress enough; if you want to feel those all-encompassing moments -- the ones that will still be capable of sweeping you over and under with their raw beauty and their emotions a quarter century or more after they've happened, put down the screen for God's sake, and just experience them with all your human senses, and nothing more. 

Take a picture in your brain, another in your heart, and another on your skin as the moment wraps you up and envelopes you. 

It's the only way to really keep a memory for all its worth.  An Instagram or Facebook post will never do it justice.