How do you become and capture yourself becoming at the same time?
Sometimes I have moment-collecting anxiety. I fear that life goes by so quickly that I am barely able to catch each passing moment by the tails and fully live in the Now. This desire to freeze time is why I’ve become so drawn to photography. Snap a picture, immortalize a moment. This is why I want to master storytelling, which for me is another way of saying I won’t forget.
Because when you take the little moments and the big moments and string them together, what you’ve got is, well, what you’ve got. Moments make up a lifetime. They are all we have, really. I believe that some moments stretch longer than others and bear upon us infinite meaning, while most moments pass us by with little impact on our memory and our becoming.
I’m not sure when I became so keenly aware of the paradox of time, but since then I’ve begun to imagine my life as a continuous movie reel in my consciousness. There’s the past simply floating on loop wherever the past floats, the future vivid yet dreamy in my imagination and then there’s me, grounded squarely in the Now. My motions rippling through the gears of the universe as I move along my story. Each moment in and of itself, an original.
“Now is now, and now is already a long time ago.” (Wilder, Laura Ingalls) What baffles me most about being alive is that time is always in abundance and yet our time on this planet so brief and fleeting. I’ve only started to grasp life as a delicate and bittersweet dance of feeling the heartbeat of every moment and letting go as quickly as we’ve arrived.
Now more than ever, I can feel the steady pulse of time in tune with my own becoming. Everything, right away, all at once.
Bea