If These Pictures Can Talk

Have you ever had the feeling that certain pictures and places held so many memories, the walls quivered with untold stories and secrets kept? Pictures and places stand still and tall, watching silently as we fill up the pages in the stories of our lives. The world is a construction--very real and tangible, but only a stage for the souls that traverse it. But these constructions are saturated with memory. The older the place, it seems the louder is the echo of these souls from lives that have passed this way before us.

I'm not really talking about ghosts, but about the feeling that a picture can remember--like our bodies, walls and earth and trees and air can hold the skin-memories of pleasures and pains past. The old cliche about the exchange rate of pictures for words has always been a fluctuating market. While some images are worth exactly a 1000 words, many are worth so much more. Pictures not only serve as a way to remember the moment, but to help us understand what is important in our life. Imagine being able to look back at any day of your year and recall what you did, who you met, what you learned... Often we find it hard to remember what we did just yesterday or even last night - let alone a whole year ago, especially if there is a lot of alcohol and partying involved.

In the book Moonwalking with Einstein, Joshua Foer, delves into the intricacies of human memory and provides a detail account on how we remember and process memories. Foer indicates "our memories are painful reminders of how transient we are".... and provides are some interesting facts:

• We are all subject to curve of forgetting. We lose ½ of all memories in the 1st hour, another 10 after the 1st day and after a month another 14%
• Much of what we think we have forgotten is actually still present in our minds. Photos help us remember events that we might otherwise forget.
• Our short-term memories hold 7+or - two items. We should not rely on our memories for recalling long lists.
• The brain accounts for 2% of the body’s weight, yet consume 20% of the oxygen we breath. No wonder it takes so much energy to remember everything.

There are some techniques that are used to help increase your memory and most involve associating items with graphic images. While I’m glad to know these techniques, I know I won't use them - it is simply too easy to take a picture and use it to supplement my imperfect memory. Whether it is anniversaries, relationships, hugs, laughs, good times, dinners, drinks, cats, and off course birthdays, recording pictures leaves you with rich visual history of your life and things to look forward to. Life is short and time moves surprisingly fast, shouldn't you spend it creating lots of memories. The simplest way around changing memories is to preserve them - After all, unlike your memories, pictures do not change over time. Maybe that’s why I’ve decided to record a photo a day for a whole year and add this to my bucket list of 50+ things to do in this lifetime.