“I think if you document every single moment of your life, then you will have many memories.” This is what a young man told me last weekend when I had a chat with him as he participated in an event called Google Hack where millennials showed the latest apps they have developed to see what others think of them. His outfit developed an app where the users would be reminded to take as many snapshots of themselves or what they are experiencing as much they can and post it – like a diary on steroids (and even those steroids on steroids). I have been thinking about his app and what he said since then.
I am mainly a writer so I am steeped in the tradition of expression which is oriented outward. But writing is also a deeply inward thing for me – both a cultivation and an expression of an inner life which I, as much as I can, carefully navigate so that I am able to balance my inner life and how I make sense of things to express to the world. If I am lucky, I with 1,800 words or less, could “explain, enchant and elevate” as Maria Popova thinks science writing should do. I have been doing a science column for over 700 weeks without skipping a week and never did it occur to me to document the moment I do it even if science writing is one of the most important, challenging and joyful things I do with my waking hours. So if the young man is right about photos being equal to memories, then a big chunk of my life would be lost to my own home of memories.
But the young man may be missing some things as I think only an older person like me can tell him. One, is that forgetting things is part of learning. Not all the moments in your life deserve the same degree of attention and perhaps, documentation. Otherwise you clutter your brain’s hard drive and do not home in the much bigger and more important skill of “filtering” to know what is important to you and what you have to do in your own life.
Second, you cannot passionately mine a moment in its fullness and still also be concerned with how you would look in it for others to see. Being conscious of the moment and of how you would look in a photo of it cannot happen at the exact same time. One blurs the other. Just like quantum physics where you can’t know where an electron is and also how fast it is at the same time – an observer’s gaze limits what it can tell you. Once you decide to observe it, only either of those are knowable to you. You can’t have it both ways. Something is always lost when you are made aware that you are being documented, even by yourself. If you are willing to lose that portion, then make peace with that loss because nature so far has told us that we cannot have it all.
Lastly, there is a magnificent and most powerful undercurrent happening through all the photos, videos, and comments in the vast universe of social media. It is called “living” – the great unfolding, making and remaking of each of our inner lives as we encounter each other, other life forms and things. It is what drives you to do something for someone without a shadow of a thought for a logo, a post or tweet. It is what makes you show up at work everyday thinking maybe, just maybe you will be able to do something that could count in the pool of human attempts to make today better not just for yourself. It is what happens when you discover and understand something for yourself and you feel your spirit click its own heels doing so! It is what makes us well up in tears when we witness tragedy and more, reach out to let those who have fallen to let them know that we too died a little when they did. It is what we feel when you put our arms around a beloved to say “thank you for being in my life.” It is what makes us sit in a corner to look at our lifelong beloved family and friends and accept that time is a very strange thing that inhabits each of us so that youth, middle and old age are just the different angles of light of the prisms we are to each other. To fully soak in all that glory, a post about it could only be a “post-post”. You only think about it afterwards and if you are lucky, you get some traces of it to share in photos and videos. This is because of the “invisibility of the inner life” as the late Oliver Sacks put it so beautifully.
Our inner lives are inherently invisible because meaning is invisible. But you could see it only if you show up in your own life and not for a photo or video of it. When you do, embrace that dense, rich and complex invisibility and perhaps come to the surface once in a while to take snapshots of what you seem to be after. But dive again and forget the shutter.
May your days be filled with invisible things. – Rappler.com