Why you should choose to experience reality rather than capture it
Our desire to capture a moment is preventing us from experiencing it in all its grandeur
The summer travel season is in full swing. And judging by the planes I have been on, odds are you have been somewhere recently or are likely heading out soon.
As you move about, I have one piece of advice: Be Where You Are.
This is not a Zen koan or some sort of Yoda-ism. I mean it as it reads.
We all must learn to be present wherever we find ourselves geographically situated. Our five senses wash over us with an array of new stimuli. We must give our conscious attention to this.
We, all of us, are really horrible at this right now.
Rather than experience things directly, we have let our screens sit between us and the real world.
About a month ago, I was in the Natural History Museum in London. A fascinating place I have visited numerous times. My favorite room there is the rock room, dinosaurs be damned. The rock room is over 100 yards long with samples of every type of rock in crazy crystalline structures.
This summer, as I was wandering through the exhibit, person after person walked up to a display case, snapped a picture and walked away. The whole encounter lasted 10 seconds.
They didn’t read the description, nor did they even pause to actually look at the formation.
What for?
In a week’s time, they will have no context for the picture. It will be one of a thousand throw away “memories.” A picture of a rock, nothing more or less.
Instead, rather than a picture, they could have paused and been present. They may have learned something. Some of the structures are quite beautiful. Others, eery and disturbing.
But none of this registers when reality is treated as a consumption experience.
Rather than being present in the moment, we are treating it as something we can take off the shelf and capture in a photo.
One of the tragic limitations of being human is that we are bound by time and memory. A moment is fleeting. And for nearly the entirety of human history, there was an inability in being able to record for posterity. The moment was all we had.
So, there is nothing sinister about our desire to capture moments…a very human response to this inherent limitation. The problem is that our attempts to preserve the moment have robbed us of the actual experience of them.
We no longer watch a guitarist start a show, feeling the sound wash over us and shake our bones. Instead, we film it through a 7” screen.
Which one is more impactful? Having all 5 senses impress in our memories a moment or compressing an experience into a short video?
Something will be lost either way. Being present opens us to the eventual degradation of memory. But, presence offers the potential for insight, for change, for transcendence. Moreover, it is through our presence that we find the joys of discovery or companionship.
At the end of life, it will not be an iCloud account full of pictures that mark our lives. Instead, it will be the people we become through our experiences.
May you have safe and present journeys.