Picture: A Momentary Flash of Your Life:

There is something so fresh and new each time you pull out a picture from a shoe box or look at one pasted in an album. One day you may look a little closer, and you may see behind the canvas that has been painted for you. You may remember the feeling or smell the air. You may be able at that moment to put away the anger or the angst of daily living and feel a tranquility or excitement. It is your picture and you get to hold it any way that you like.

I am not talking about the millions or billions of electronic pictures that hide in the background of your phone or live endlessly on the internets. I am talking about the honest to goodness pictures that are printed, and you can hold in your hand and touch. They may be slick on one side and dull on the other. They tell a story of your past and can be passed from person to person for hundreds of years.

These memories were created and live in a new day and a new time. They clutch bits of humanity. A brief moment is captured and released. No matter what, these pictures always tells a story. There is always someone behind the lens and those posing or being frozen in time and space in front of it. It is a miracle of technology. Moreover, whoever picks up that picture gets to make up any story as they see fit.

Sometimes there is nothing so sad as a picture. There may be smiles or hugs staring back at you, but you never get to go back except in your mind. There is no time traveling machine that will whisk you away so that you may jump back into that picture to relive that moment. This fact is what makes me sad sometimes. I look at moments stopped in time and wish to have them back. I would like a do-over or I just want to relive that time once again with those people.

This may or may not happen to you, if it does, you may, at some point in your life, want to print up some pictures. It is only natural. You will want something more substantial than a bunch or 0 and 1’s floating carelessly in some server or in the nether reaches of some electronic device. You have only two true choices: pick carefully and judiciously or print them all and see what is really there. This is only the beginning of the project. After you begin printing, you have to decide what to do with all those pictures and where to put them for safe keeping.

In my life, shoe boxes have been great repositories for pictures. You might want to go buy a pair of shoes so that you have a safe place to store your memories. I am in no way saying that you must have a shoe box. Any box will do.  Go look for where and how your parents and grandparents have hidden their memories and take them out. Open the box or boxes or albums and see what you can find from the past and make up your own stories. But, once you have printed your pictures and found a place to store them, you will want to display some of them. This is where the hard work begins.

You will want to be careful about the picture frame that you choose and the picture that needs to be placed in that frame. It is the matching of the two that will tell much about you. They tell a story beyond the picture and give insight into the workings of your mind. The story has more to do with you than it has to do with the picture.  What do you see in the picture? Why did you use that particular frame? Why does that picture need to be protected and displayed when all the others are gathering dust in your shoe boxes or turning brown and curling in old picture albums?

It goes beyond those ideas. How are you going to tell your story to those that want to know you? How are you going to bring to light the important or not so important moments that have made you who you are? You are in no way the sum total of those pictures nor are those pictures you. They are a momentary flash of your life. They are a time where someone stopped life for eternity or until the picture fades away or is lost.

It is a picture.