Thanksgiving

Time marches on.  What seems like an eternity may be a fleeting moment.  I had been gathering “journey” quotes hoping they might spark some interesting piece of writing.  It wasn’t the quotes but a project that I have been putting off that stimulated a need to put fingers to the keyboard.

Like many people who grew up with printed pictures that ended up in volumes of albums, we dragged quite the collection of photographic memories with us in our move.  Had I been smart enough before the move, I would have transferred the pictures to boxes and saved a whole lot of packing space.  Last year’s project involved boxing.  Unfortunately, like the albums, nothing was labelled.  A “need” to label created a “to do” for another day.

Even though most index cards will have a distinct location of shot collections, many will also have “Year ?” marked.  (Oh, the joy of old prints that would actually have a date on the back from the photo processor!)  But, in the end, with the smiles and, sometimes, cringes the shots will bring, does the exact “when” really matter?

The project (still in process) took me back to the first quote:

“Life is not just about peaks and valleys, about wins and losses. Life is about the journey. You hear that all the time. You’ve got to absorb that. You’ve got to know that. The journey has to become the destination because there is no true destination. There is no endpoint. There is no goal. All rivers run to the sea and yet the sea is not full. Life goes on; accept what life gives you. The sun rises the morning after you win the championship or lose in the first round.”

— Paul Assaiante

Going through decades and decades of snippets of time, highlighted another:

“The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but your thoughts about it.”  – Ekhart Tolle

How many time frames do we all have where we think it can’t get any worse, how the world will surely end, how we will never be happy again?  And, here we are, looking at a snapshot of that moment in time and it did get better, and the world didn’t end, and we managed to be happy again.

A stranger might look at my / our collection of memories and have no idea what was going on at the time, where these things might have taken place, or who might be forever captured in the prints.  It doesn’t matter.

“Sometimes the people around you won’t understand your journey.  They don’t need to, it’s not for them.”  – Zero Dean

And, that’s OK.