August is endless
#70: Our never-ending summer, getting a grip on time, and the quest to remember, featuring an edit of rejects from the archive
August is endless — here before you know it and stuck to your sandal; blacktop bubblegum slowly scraped away with the nearest gravel. I don’t know how we got here. Do you?
Between my indoor retreat and the many skipping town, this bubbling heat bowl begs for my presence. I stay inside, silent and invisible. In the coming months, a milder breeze will pace our porch till prevalent. And on one morning late in October, that breeze will turn cool: August will have ended.
But for now, we linger and we tussle. We tow our totaled optimism to the very end. It’s a marathon, not a sprint. I hope you trained for this…
Time is not agreeable. How can we add up something that keeps on adding? The sum escapes us.
Some time extends into eternity: we sink into it, slow like quicksand. Other times are shrink wrap — spring, for instance (instants), allows exactly zero space for more expansion. Flowers blooming and wilting, all in one spin of the marble.
No matter the month, our hope to ground ourselves is right here; the present moment is the most measurable. Take out the tape and feel it stretch across the width of today, this single hour, our minutes and seconds of now. Just be.
Let’s remember 🖼️
As our collective downtime drags on, I’m thinking again about my role as a photographer and the necessity of sacrificing the moment for a photograph. Seeing as we all now keep a thousand-dollar camera on hand –📱 – it occurs to me that maybe we all struggle with the conflict of making memories and our record of them. NPR shared a great article touching on this; I found this most poignant:
Look at your photos regularly. Photos are an effective tool for memory retention only if we take the time to look at photos — which many of us don't do, says Henkel: "We need to take the time to look at photos after the experiences and reactivate those mental representations."
My partner, Mary, is great at this. She’ll take some time before bed to scroll through the day’s photos — sometimes continuing the scroll through the past week or month. In this act, not only does she commit experiences to memory, but she gains a greater appreciation for our present living.
“Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn't matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough.”
Richard Feynman
“Looking at photos” has sparked an almost forgotten memory. It’s hard to believe it was over 8 years ago. My son, daughter-in-law and I were sitting in the waiting room when we got the, perhaps anticipated but not what we hoped for, diagnosis confirming that my wife of 50 years had cancer. My daughter-in-law looked at me and immediately moved next to me. She took out her phone and proceeded to scroll through every single photo in her archive, describing each one as she went. People and places I knew and didn’t know. I don’t know how long we sat there (hours), but taking my mind off what what had happened and the unknowns that lay ahead, and the beautiful love that was behind the moment was and is cherished and provided remarkable therapy for that brief moment in time.