It’s that time of year again. In my family before we
leave for vacation we usually have a tradition of dusting, mopping, and sorting everything out in the entire house; my
mom especially is quite religious about cleaning up. I finished the usual, tidied up my room, my
desk, the living room, the dining room, and did the laundry. But there was one
thing that I had neglected to do in a while: Organize my pictures.
Now
you may think, “Oh that’s easy” well it’s not! I’m the biggest picture junkie
you will ever meet. I take my camera everywhere, even to school. I feel that we
are constantly surrounded by great moments and scenery. Pictures have great
meaning behind them, they are a form of art in itself, and they have extremely
powerful messages. Let’s get back to the story. Most of my pictures are
digitalized, yet every month I make sure to get them printed. I keep telling
myself that I will organize them tomorrow and such is the human nature that
tomorrow never arrives.
The
pile of printed pictures in my room were now becoming mountainous, pictures I
had taken since the start of my photography career at the age of four, along
with some pictures my parents and sister had taken. Not only was this not
aesthetically pleasing and got in the way of things, but it was beginning to
ruin the quality of the print of the photos and that’s what caused me to take
action.
I
bought 12 photo binders; 11 of them for each of my years of photo taking from
the age of 4-15, and an extra for the pictures I had taken from others in my
family. By the end of the day the mountain was nonexistent.
Before
this tedious process began I was extremely overwhelmed with the amount of
pictures I saw, just as you would probably be overwhelmed if I had posted King
Kong sized paragraphs rather than utilizing smaller ones. My brain was in
denial, “You can clean this up when you get back, there’s no need to do it
now,” was what it was telling me. But as the clock ticked, I recalled an essay
from freshman year that I had put off for a month and ended up pulling off an
all-nighter the day before it was due. It was extremely stressful, not quality
work, and it was all due to pushing it off for such a long time. So my body for
once listened to logic and began making its way towards the domestic version of
Mount Everest against the illogical desires of my cowardly brain.
As
soon as I made those first steps, my brain figured there was nothing better to
do but follow my legs being the sheep for once. I felt better and more relaxed,
and then I got to work. But getting my brain to oblige was by far the easiest
part in comparison to what was to come next, sorting through the pictures.
A
person looking from the outside would see a short, nerdy girl thumbing each
picture, looking at it closely, and putting it in a pile. Yet inside my head a
flurry of memories were recalled. As it stated in a story I’ve mentioned in my
past blogs, Memoria Ex Machina, human
memories are attached to physical things, whether they be books, pictures, or
even a radio. For me these pictures were my connection to the past. Scientists
have been doing so much research on time travel yet the answer is easy: just
pick up a picture, pick up a book, and pick up that radio, feel that blanket,
and you will be transported back in time. Time travel is literally at our
fingertips.
I
may have been overwhelmed by the amount of work I had to do at first, but now I
was overwhelmed by memories of my early childhood all the way up to memories of
yesterday! Memories of how my cousin blew out my candles at my own birthday
party, the funeral of a close family friend, piles of stressful homework from
camp, the day my sister was born, all those times I stargazed, the last fourth
of July I celebrated in Michigan (we watched the fireworks while windsurfing),
the time I was stuck in the elevator of a foreign country, that time I was
watching the raindrops slide down the windowsill, the pleasure of catching
snowflakes on my tongue on a rare snow day, the misery I felt when I was at my
cousin’s house, my best friend when I was a kid, being stuck in the middle of a
sandstorm, the first time I played my viola with scratchy sounds coming of the
strings unlike the intricate notes I can play now on the cello, bass, and
viola…….I can go on for days about this.
And as one thing led to
another, every time one memory was unearthed from the depths of my brain, it
was so attached to others that it surfaced them as well! For example: Over this
summer I fell of a bus in the middle of a safari, it happened in the most
unusual of ways. I was sitting atop a big jeep, open, safari bus. I thought I
was cool by sitting on the railings rather than sitting on the seats like
everyone else when we were at a rest stop. I was with a bunch of kids in a camp
held in Mombasa, Kenya. My friend needed to use the bathroom so she left an
extremely expensive camera under my protection. I slug the camera over my head
and onto my neck. A camper came behind me and tried to scare me while I was
taking a picture of a monkey; not realizing that I was easily scared. I ended
up falling but my friend’s camera had miraculously wrapped itself around a pole
of the bus, so I was left dangling at the edge of the bus by the back of my
neck. Someone took my camera which had fallen in the commotion and taken a
picture of that. It reminded me of all the great times I had, the people I met,
the application process, the day we all split up and left.
If one could have seen
me at that moment they would have been amused, at one picture I was laughing
and smiling, for another I was swallowed up in deep despair. At that mind my
thinking resembled that of a file cabinet being organized: Everything was taken
out, yet slowly they were all put into place to tell my life story, only one
which I could truly remember. And arranging them helped me to remember who I
was, all that I had been through, and allowed me to look forward to what I was
to become.
After the pictures were
completely sorted out and put into place, a great sense of accomplishment and
cleanliness overtook me, I was giddy with happiness. I felt accomplished, and I
felt as if I knew more about myself than I had known before.
My mind felt at ease, I
had climbed to the top of the mountain after hours of painful yet happy
moments, and though it had put a strain on my brain to remember moments, it was
all worth it. The great task which I had been anxious and scared about earlier
in the day was now accomplished, and if I may say so, it was done amazingly,
all pictures arranged like news clippings with little anecdotes and quotes to
go along with every other page.
Though it was not an
easy project, it was worth it and I have no regrets whatsoever. It helped me
organize the story I have to tell as one of the eight billion people on this
planet. Each of our stories makes up the encyclopedia of the human race. I learned
of memories and moments that had occurred without me even knowing, as well as
relearned memories that I had forgotten. Doing this also taught me a lesson:
It’s good to organize your life. If I had just done this earlier instead of
allowing it to turn into the mayhem it became I could have had these memories
for a longer time, it’s easier for my brain to understand and truly allows me
to look closely at my ideas and what I am saying. It is as strange as relearning your native
language or rereading a book. It allowed me to take a closer look at my life,
reevaluate myself, and discover new meaning. Just like in Thomas Wilder’s Our Town I was finally there and truly
aware of what had happened and it made me more aware of my present. I had to go
into the past to appreciate my present.
