Metacognition: Pictures

            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.