Do you remember photo albums?

Do you remember the true photo albums, and not the 10101010 holding spot associated with your “library” on your computer?

Do you recall the plasticine pages that stuck to each other, smelling of a weird amalgamate of chemicals, needing to be surgically peeled from one another to advance the memories?

Do you recall the experience of gathering with the album sharer, and listening to the stories explaining the family member, the travel memory, the captured natural beauty, the funny expression, the inebriated pose, the passionate kiss, or the moving scene?

Do you remember the size of the picture, the washed out coloration, the frayed edges, and the off-light halo that impressed itself into the oldest of pictures?

Do you recall the change, the fade, and the disintegration of those memory panels?  Does each flip bring pronounced decay?  Does each storytelling breathe beads of caustic destruction upon those memories?

Or have we forgotten this way of recording our memories?  As ancillary support, these photo albums once served to preserve, and to accent our memories.  Where once our stories were sufficient ways of passing on our experiences, photographs aided in augmenting the experience of memory delivery.

The drawback to these photographs, is that they are, like our own memories, subject to the laws of the physical world, and will inevitably fade.

We may have a cherished memory of ourselves, with friends, standing at the zenith of a mountain, with a ruby/orange/lemon/plum sunset creating the backdrop.  In our minds, we recall with great clarity, this massively impactful moment.  And when this picture is gazed upon, the recollection of the experience is extremely vivid.  But without the picture our memory of the moment would be inevitably blurred.

Lets assume, that this cherished picture becomes damaged in a flood, or the photo album is magically doused in water.  What happens to this picture?  It becomes blurred, washed out, and smudged.  And when we look upon this picture, our memories start to blur as well. The snapshot of that moment in time begins to warp, and twist; it bends, swirls, and morphs into a completely changed memory.

But now there is a new way of chronicling our precious moments.  We can record them digitally.  We take pictures, create videos, and record, check in, and log our experiences digitally.  And in a manner, we also share these with people, and attempt to describe them to our friends, family, and loved ones.  The trouble with this approach is that those with whom we are sharing, aren’t sitting in the room with us.  They aren’t hearing our voices describe how a given vista made our breath catch in our throats.  They aren’t listening to our description of the rhythmic waves crashing upon the shore as the incredible sunrise broke the canopy of night.  They don’t know the chill on our skin, the ache in our muscles, or the hunger in our stomachs, as we climbed to an incredible height to record a masterful snapshot of a placid valley.

And the most detached part about a digital frame, is that it experiences nothing of time.  All thing fade, all things age, progress, and show wear and tear.  Our memories find themselves in states that have borne the mild effects of an eraser.  Faces become washed out and blurred.  Colors blend into each other.  Details of people we once regarded so integrally to our lives, fragment, and meld into others we had thought important.  But the digital snapshot remains unadulterated.  The unfortunate revelation is that the digital memory, in actually, doesn’t exist.

The organic memory, suffers from the passing of time.  Many say, that memory is unreliable, and that is the truth.  That revelation, is what makes them so important, so vital, and so deeply human.  The ability, gift, and benevolent blessing, that human beings have to devivify our memories, saves our perpetual self.   The inorganic way of freeze-framing our lives allows no ability to morph, change, and move on from earlier iterations of ourselves.  The only options regarding digital photos and recordings, is obliteration or a sterile translation of ones and zeros.

So, as I speak to you digitally, I urge you to hear me organically.  Our lives, our feelings, our hearts, and our existence, are made up of the experiences that we share with other human beings, in person.  Likes, loves, tweets, retweets, shares, and any other manner of “social media” validation, do not serve to enhance our human souls, but only contribute to the anxiousness that feed a vacuous, digital, need.  We need each other to laugh.  We need each other to cry.  We need each other to swell our emotions.  And, we need each other to create and share our memories.

Remember who you are, remember how you feel, and remember what truly makes you feel alive.

Humbly yours,

J