I was just looking at my year in review video, courtesy of Facebook. There were a lot of great photos: my dogs sleeping in an assortment of venues, including on the bed, in shafts of sunlight on the kitchen floor, in laps, at my office and on the porch glider. Lots of pictures of food I made and ate at dinner parties. In fact, were I to post the Facebook video, you would conclude that most of what I did in 2016 was watch my dogs sleep and then go eat.
Actually, 2016 was a pretty full year. I flew to Portland and drove with my husband down the Oregon Coast to Sausalito, where I met up with my best friend from high school. While there I timidly ventured into a medical marijuana shop where I purchased a cannabis-infused topical cream, which really did ease the back pain from all that flying and driving.
I went to San Miguel, Mexico, for a writer’s conference and rode the range, with my husband and three caballeros, on horseback. I drove to Cincinnati and Louisville to meet up with my bestie, Cindy, and to explore a new town. I planned, with my husband and two buddies, a trip to Oaxaca, Mexico, but got diverted to Key West. And I took my mother to Denver to meet her first great-grandchild.
I also made a commitment to my freelance writing career, gave a few speeches, went on some hikes, decided to build a house, got a keratin treatment for my hair, did a few unspeakable things to upgrade my face and kissed the aforementioned sleeping dogs a hundred thousand million times everywhere they lay. A lot of this is on Facebook but, for whatever reason, was not included in the video it created for me. And a lot of it is not on Facebook but resides in my (and my husband’s) private photo archives.
I have taken photographs and kept journals since age 12. Some say Napolean Bonaparte was ill from a young age because he knew the challenges awaiting him as an adult, and he was pre-freaking out. I believe I started recording my life at a young age because I knew I’d be challenged to recall it later.
I have an earliest memory, at about age 5, then almost nothing until age 12. From age 12 up to a minute ago, it’s anyone’s guess whether what happened to me or around me made it into the permanent archives of my head. Only time will tell.
So I photograph constantly and write obsessively, tucking most of it away in boxes and files. I do not return to my journals often, mainly when I am looking to recall the date of some important event. But when I do, I’m sometimes rewarded with entries like this one, from my twenties: “Severe and horrible depression. Details later.” Why the details of my crisis could not be expounded upon in the moment is anyone’s guess; probably I had to rush off to a dinner party.
The point is, because I logged the big and small events and corresponding emotions of my life, they are not lost to time or to my long-ago concussion or to the distractibility which makes me forgetful and unable to follow simple movies or distinguish certain faces from others. And for this lifelong impulse to record what instantly becomes the past, I am grateful.
“Live in the present,” I hear all the time, but what exactly IS the present, except the highest block in the pyramid of my life, underneath which is a scaffolding of a million moments unfolded? Just when I feel I’ve accomplished nothing of merit, done nothing of interest, gone nowhere worthy of mention and loved not nearly enough, I can open my journal, scroll my Facebook feed, plunder my photo archives and see again the framework of a life fully lived. It reminds me that every moment, however fleeting, is itself a thing of gold, and a ladder to every other.
Dana Shavin is the author a memoir, “The Body Tourist.” Email her at Dana@danashavin.com.