Life is beautiful, so why do I need a photo to prove it?

 

Hello everyone,  my name is Mary.  And I’m a recovering shutterbug-aholic.  My obsession with photos began when I was four years old and my parents gave me a toy Fisher-Price camera for Christmas.   Luckily for my parents the world/Fisher-Price hadn’t developed the technology that would allow a four-year-old to take real photos in the 1970’s so I was kept happy with a fancy slide show I could see through the fake lens of the camera.    I had to ask my second-grade teacher how to spell photographer when I was asked to draw a picture of what I wanted to be when I grew up.  To this day my husband has not forgiven me for ruining a romantic drive through the great Smoky Mountains in Tennessee by insisting we stop every few hundred feet to capture these incredible miniature waterfalls trickling down epic granite rockfaces covered with abundant leaves in their autumnal colors.     And although my foray into the world of professional photography amounted to one summer class in college, I am still naïvely pointing my smartphone at several objects/people/places hoping that photographic image will make Ansel Adams jealous. 

So, you think when I’m seeing my Facebook friends post the “10 random photos” challenge on Facebook to prove life is beautiful I’d be all over that challenge.   I’d be posting a photo every 10 minutes from my vast collection showing how life is beautiful.    My biggest challenge might be to just limit myself to 10 random photos showing how life is beautiful.   Heck, I thought the whole point of Facebook is for everyone to post photos on how their life is beautiful on a routine basis. 

And yet- why is a little voice inside of my head telling me “Don’t do it Mary”.  

I think the reason why I’m reluctant to follow this Facebook challenge is that I still don’t completely trust Facebook.  Say for example I post a picture of this wonderful winter scene with a caption “Wow I have my own Courier and Ives picture postcard scene to enjoy while sipping on my Starbucks soy vanilla latte”.    Chances are Facebook will pass my picture & caption onto Starbucks and best case scenario Starbucks may give me coupon for a buy one get one free coffee.   More than likely case scenario is they’ll pester my Facebook family & friends like my mother-in-law with their Starbucks adds underneath my post or somehow post to their Facebook page a plea to drink more of a product my mother-in-law compares to burnt water.   (Actually, I think my mother-in-law would prefer burnt water to a cup of Starbucks).    And I’m not sure if I should be publicly endorsing Starbucks if they’re trying to prevent their employees from unionizing so the baristas can afford buy Starbucks coffee.

Not to mention sometimes we don’t need pretty pictures; we need ugly ones.   I just got done watching Ken Burns latest PBS special called “The U.S. and The Holocaust.”   As I watched it, I learned several things.  1. Adolph Hitler was inspired to do what he did by prominent late nineteenth and early twentieth century American hate-mongering eugenics idiots like Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, 2.  Anne Frank would be a 93-year-old great grandmother of four with a screenwriting credit on “80 for Brady” if America wasn’t so horrifically antisemitic in the 1930’s and 40’s.   3.  Ken Burns owes a lot of his visuals to the average Jupp Nazi who decided to take vomit inducing snapshots of their fellow satanic comrades shooting innocent Jewish men, women, & children in the head in a ditch.    Maybe if Facebook was around in the 1930’s the Holocaust would have been stopped.   Then again maybe Facebook would accelerate the whole Holocaust situation like they did with the Rohingya in Myanmar.  https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-facebooks-systems-promoted-violence-against-rohingya-meta-owes-reparations-new-report/  which of course leads me to point 4.  Yes I too failed to prevent/still failing to prevent modern day genocides because somehow the numbers are too overwhelming to comprehend and I feel so small and helpless when compared to the numbers.

Yes, I am obsessed with photos because I know a picture can say a thousand words and pictures have moved us to action, to honor, to right a wrong, to preserve a treasure to be kept alive for a thousand years.   However, as I grow older.  Part of me realizes that maybe you don’t need a picture to remember how life is beautiful.

Take, for example a scene I witnessed a couple of Sundays ago at my local church.   Our associate pastor is a humble priest from Colombia who loves to deliver his homilies with a comedic touch.   Like all priest he usually waits in the doorway in the vestibule after mass to greet the parishioners as they exit the church.  My husband was busy trying to practice the Spanish he was learning with one of my church’s bilingual deacons leaving me to watch this magical scene unfolding before my eyes.  Our associate pastor was busy entertaining a pair of two-year-old twin girls, by having them play with the folds of his green and gold chasuble.  He was like a magician making one briefly disappear only to magically reappear again with a mere flick of his vestment.   The girls were delighted with his chasuble and he was delighted with the bright smiles on their faces.  It seemed so magical and part of me wanted to just grab my camera to capture this joyous moment to preserve it forever.  And yet, I held off, keeping the joy of the moment to myself and sharing a smile with my local priest.

Happiness is always a fleeting moment, and you can never truly capture it.   Beauty will fade and even an image of beauty will fade with time.   So, maybe it’s always best to remember life is beautiful with memories especially when life is so hard.

And it’s probably best to keep those Kodak moments to yourself or directly email them with the friends/family who bring you joy instead of just randomly putting them on Facebook.