Snapshots

When you remember an event, what does it “look” like, or feel like?  How do we “experience” the past?  A new website I subscribed to recently suddenly had me thinking quite a bit about this.

According to the scientists (and no, I am not even going to try and make this into a scientific paper with references - just go search Scientific American for some good articles), we have long term memories, short term memories and sensory memory.  We have ways to remember things that we use to drive a car for example, which seems to be located in a different part of the brain than the part that remembers your fifth birthday.  The sensory memory fades quickly and is related to what we remember shortly after having seen a flash card with a number of items on it.

I am interested in what I call the snapshots in time that we seem to carry with us.  These are those images that somehow get burned into our minds: a specific scene that we remember fondly, how someone looked on a specific day, a feeling that we resurrect sometimes in moments of solitude.  Do these snapshots fade or change over time, do we re-contextualize them as we move on in life and what is it that makes for a good snapshot for each of us - is it the same for all of us? 

My first overseas trip was when I was already 35 years old.  I remember packing my analogue camera and a video camera to make sure that I capture as much of the event as possible and bring it back to share with my wife and family.  I took hours of video, and quite a few rolls of film.   The film I promptly developed on my return and as soon as I had an opportunity I sat my wife down in front of he TV and started playing back the video.  I had high expectations of how she would react.  Obviously it was not going to be the same as being there, but still, it would be great to share all these events. 

Not so.  And you will probably tell me that you could have told me so!

Some things that I found very special she found utterly boring.  I had long sweeping country side shots, she asked what the people looked like.  I had lots of pictures of old churches and great buildings, she wanted to know how I experienced the interactions with the people I met.  Yes, it was great to see the different places and things, but to her there was a disappointing  lack of “life” in what I brought back.  After that, I noticed that she almost always had people in her photographs, some posed, but mostly just grabbed in a moment!  Somehow our contexts were not overlapping...

Maybe we all have different signals that we use to recover the experience?  And this brings me back to the website that triggered all of this:  Blipfoto.com.  Here you are allowed to post only one image on the day that you took it, building a snapshot collage of the days of your life.  I’ll let you go there from here just now.  But before you go, first imagine something that you would have liked to capture today and that you would have posted there.  I have learned that I need people in my snapshots too, and not posed for the moment so much as just being in the moment of life - frozen in a certain setting that will help me recall a multitude of emotions.   Enough already - link me to Blipfoto!