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The Photographs I Missed, Of A Day That I Didn’t

Last weekend we decided to take a spontaneous Saturday trip to the beach, as we’ve recently moved to within a two-hour drive of the North Carolina coast.

We woke-up, tossed the essentials (including children) into the back of the car, and by lunchtime we were feeling the glorious sting of scalding hot sand beneath our feet.

Just as we were getting out of the car, I made what for me, was a split-second, paradigm-shifting decision: I left my phone behind.

Now, before you minimize this move or roll your eyes in a sarcastic display of great underwhelmedness, I want you to think about the last time you spent 6 hours (heck, 6 minutes) voluntarily, without your phone.

(For many of you, that may have been the day before you ever got one).

You see, I’ve been noticing something about myself and about you; something frightening and tragic.

We’re all missing something fleeting and rare and priceless—something that we should be urgently, obsessively consumed with.

We’re missing Life.

You and I have become so fixated on letting others know what we’re doing during every breathing second, so burdened with capturing and filtering and broadcasting our days—that we’re forfeiting much of them.

Can you remember the last time you shared an intimate, quiet moment with your child or with your spouse, or simply alone with nature or with whoever you believe God to be, and didn’t try to turn it into a photo op? Or spent some alone time that you didn’t need to carefully plot out into a perfect tabletop still life to share it with the world?

Has your life become something that exists more for public consumption than personal cultivation?

Somehow we’ve even managed to photograph ourselves supposedly napping or deep in prayer or snuggling our kids, giving everyone who cares to look, a peek into the most sacred spaces of our lives, even as we dress them up for our viewers.

Being your own personal photojournalist comes at a price, and that price is often the very time and memories you’re supposedly cataloging.

If you’re anything like me, you have online photo albums packed with really beautiful, perfectly cropped, wonderfully pristine images of countless events and experiences (which is a good thing, since in the process of taking said images we barely remember many of them).

In the palms of our hands, we all have half a dozen portals that allow us to instantly and continually share lives, that we’re now all to busy to actually live.

That day on beach, I decided to try living life with those who were with me, instead of artistically documenting it for those who were not.

Something really great happened in me during those few hours.

Without access to the virtual world, I spent all of my time in the actual one.

For a brief afternoon, I was fully present for my own life, and fully present to those around me. I was one hundred percent there.

Unfettered by the search for the perfect Instagram moment, I moved more slowly and purposefully.
My heart and mind stopped racing, simply taking in the breathtaking panorama in front of me, instead of trying to capture it with a 2-inch screen, for people hundreds of miles aways who will largely click right by.
Without my head perpetually bowed into the palms of my hands, I saw everything, for the first time in a long time.

When’s the last time the people around you received the benefit of all of you?
When’s the last time you saw everything?
When’s the last time you didn’t need to share your every moment and thought and meal with the world?

I may have missed some really great photo opportunities that afternoon.
I may have missed the chance at a bunch of likes and comments, and the quick high of the momentary attention of relatively strangers—but I know what I didn’t miss.

That afternoon, I didn’t miss my life.

Don’t miss yours. 

 

 

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