Living in the Days of Future Past

How to save your life in 5 minutes or less.

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash.

When I was a young man, I remembered every movie I’d ever seen. Places I’d been. Restaurants enjoyed. People met. My photos were mostly a creative exercise, like a journal full of detail and consideration rather than documents of time and place.

I lived in the fantasy that my photos were incidental to the journey.

But the other day I was surprised by the picture on my Home Screen photo widget. It was a younger me, with my daughter, surrounded by palm trees and flags. An amusement park, for sure. And checking the surrounding photos, it was Universal Studios in Florida. In 2001. Pre 9/11. With grandparents alive. Vintage family vacation. Just a random photo bookmark in the blur of parenthood.

But that moment, captured at 1/100th of a second, was a time machine that recalled a whole day of fun together, caramel corn, stomach churning rides, and tired happy kids in the backseat on a dusky highway. .

I remember now.

How cool.

How amazing it is, this dad stuff.

And how forgotten sometimes.

Well, not forgotten really, but sidelined. Lost in the mental clutter of years lived with millions of competing moments.

“If you don’t think that photos are important, wait until they are all that you have left.”

So here’s the thing.

Unless your memory is more bulletproof than mine (arguably true, I admit), photos are not incidental at all. They are essential keys to our past. Entry to our memory bank.

Which changes the equation about how much we need our photos. Not ALL of them, of course. But enough to create a rich timeline. And to eliminate any self-judgement about the 30,000 photos in your library. We aren’t streamlining our sock drawer, after all. We’re nurturing our lives.

Looked at another way, 30,000 photos at 1/100th of a second amounts to only 5 minutes of photography to record a lifetime of experiences. That’s a pretty good deal.

And it’s a reminder that this day, right now, may need some attention as well. Who knows what will happen tomorrow? How we’ll look back at today in 10 years? Or 20?

These are the days of future past. Don’t discount them. Someday the only thing we’ll have to recall them are the photos we take now. So they can delight us when they pop up in our Photos Widget.

If you missed the blog post about Photo Widgets, go here.