Whenever I see a beautiful thing, or experience a wonderful feeling, my instinct is to preserve it, to record it however I can. I grab for my camera or I just think to myself that I want to remember this, so I contort my brain a bit and squeeze and just try to memorize this moment, this feeling, so I can hang onto it and come back to it later. But the trouble is that I’ve found this act of remembering takes me away from even experiencing the moment in the first place.
Instead of seeing the way the light hits the tall prairie grass in the morning, and feeling the cool air and hearing the finches singing, I put a lens between myself and these experiences, either literally with the camera, or metaphorically by trying to capture the memory and already viewing the experience from the distance of the future. By saying, “I want to remember this,” I’m actually saying, “I want to remember this like this,” and adding a layer of interpretation on top of the thing itself. I’m cropping things out of the picture, adding filters and editing the image, flattening it from three dimensions into two in my mind, so it fits in my mental storage. It’s like compressing an entire world of feeling into a low quality jpeg.
It’s a subtle shift, but I’d like to try and not remember these things as I experience them, and instead just experience them and let them fade away as impermanent moments that won’t come back. Of course I probably still will remember some parts, so it’s a bit of a double bluff, but that’s all the more reason not to try so hard. It’ll happen naturally, and if it doesn’t, there will be more moments anyway, each potentially as glorious or more than the last.
It makes me so sad when I see people already experiencing the present in front of them as a video on a screen. Watching athletes walk into the Olympic stadium and every one of them staring at their phones, enamored by the streaming video of what is happening on the other side of their rectangles. The video then becomes the experience and also the memory, and the present is gone without even ever happening.
I used to record all my bike rides on an app that tracked distance and speed and the route, and it let me add pictures so when I got home I could go back and “re-experience” the ride. It was a memory aid, but I stopped using it because I found it was actually functioning as a memory replacer. As I was riding, I was already envisioning how the route would appear on the map, how I would perceive the experience afterward, contemplating what to title the ride. When I got home I’d sit at the counter after every ride and go back through what just happened, replacing the experience with this reinterpretation of it.
It’s hard to describe, but when I would look back at the rides I recorded, I remembered them as the route, the shape of the orange line on the map, rather than my actual experience on the trail. Since I’ve stopped using the app, my memories of rides are now glimmers of feelings and flashes of imagery, and meanwhile some rides have faded from my memory entirely, or at least my conscious one. The experiences are still there, though, and honestly, that’s enough. I’d rather have five real memories than ten digital replicas.
The other thing that’s separate but related is that when I do record a memory in a photo (because it’s not like I’m going to stop taking pictures entirely), I’d like to try not to go back and look at the photo for a few days, maybe even a week or two or more. I’ve found that when I’m able to do this, the photos do become memory aids, recalling the experience I had rather than replacing it in my mind, as is usually the case when I go through photos immediately after coming home from a hike or a vacation.
So the point of all this is that I want to embrace and enjoy each present moment more deeply, a theme I keep coming back to, by leaning into the now rather than trying to scoop it up and save it, because doing so is pointless anyway. Photos and even memories are imperfect representations, interpretations really, of a moment, and not the moment itself. Saving a moment is like catching a cloud: it’s impossible, so why even try?
Lovely thoughts, eloquently written. There is beauty in the ephemeral.