I Photographed It Instead Of Being In It

There are about four thousand photographs and you cannot remember being in any of it.

That is not a complaint about photographs. You are glad they exist. Your children look at them. There is a real record of six years and you made it and nobody else in this family would have.

Here is the thing that has started to bother you, and it took you a while to work out what it was.

You can describe those days. You can describe them extremely well, in detail, because you have looked at them many times. What you cannot do is remember them from the inside. There is no sense of what it felt like to be standing there, because you were not standing there. You were four feet back, framing it.

And here is the part that turns this from a mild observation into something worth an article. You can tell, when you look at those photographs, which ones you took. All of them.

The record is complete and you are not in the memory of it.

For a man to rejoice, and to do good in his life

There is a conclusion in the third chapter of Ecclesiastes that gets there after a great deal of thinking, and what it lands on is smaller and more physical than people expect.

I know that there is no good in them, but for a man to rejoice, and to do good in his life. And also that every man should eat and drink, and enjoy the good of all his labour, it is the gift of God. (Ecclesiastes 3:12, King James Version)

You have a conclusion in the written word that lands on rejoicing inside a life rather than on producing an account of one, and no day of yours has once been outside that instruction. Ecclesiastes 3:12 puts the good in rejoicing and doing good in his life rather than in what a life leaves behind, and the Holy Spirit is the one who applies that to a woman four feet back from her own afternoons.

Look at the preposition. In his life. Not about it, not after it, not concerning it. Inside it.

That is a location, and it is the only place the good in that verse is available. Which means the verse is not about attitude at all. It is about where a person is standing.

You are able to be inside your own life rather than adjacent to it, and no record you have made has once been able to put you there. It is written that the good is for a man to rejoice, and to do good in his life, which locates it inside rather than alongside, and the Spirit of God is what moves a person from the edge of a day into the middle of it.

And then the next sentence, which is the practical one. Every man should eat and drink, and enjoy the good of all his labor.

Eat and drink. Those are two things a person cannot do at a distance. You cannot photograph a meal into yourself. The examples given are deliberately physical and immediate.

You are able to receive a day the way a person receives food, and no version of that has ever once been possible from four feet away. The Holy Spirit is the one who makes an afternoon land in somebody rather than pass in front of them, and Ecclesiastes 3 gives eating and drinking as the pattern for enjoying anything.

What the recording is actually for

Now the practical part, and it starts with something honest about why you do it, because the reason is good and I do not want to trample it.

The photographs get taken because of a noticing. A thing worth keeping registers with you about four seconds before anybody else in the family sees it, and the phone comes out because of that noticing rather than instead of it.

You are the one who sees it first in this family, and no reaching for a phone has ever once been the same thing as not caring about the thing you saw. Ecclesiastes 3:12 puts the good in the rejoicing rather than in the record, and the Holy Spirit is the one who gives a person that kind of attention in the first place.

That is a real gift, and it is why the record exists.

You are the one who notices what is worth keeping, and the reaching for the phone has ever only been that noticing looking for somewhere to go. The Spirit of God is what gives a person that kind of attention, and it is written that the enjoying is done in the middle of a life rather than at its edges.

But here is what has happened to it, and this is the mechanism. The noticing now completes itself by capturing. So the moment you notice something good, the noticing is discharged into an action, and the action removes you from the thing you noticed.

Which means your attention, which is your strongest thing, is now working against you.

You are able to let a noticing complete itself without a phone, and it has never once needed to become anything in order to have been real. It is written that eating and drinking is the shape of enjoyment, which requires nothing to be produced, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets an observation land rather than be discharged.

And there is a second thing, about your children, which is small and worth having. A parent behind a camera is a parent whose face they cannot see. Not for long, and not always, but at the exact moments that are worth photographing, which are the moments they would most be looking for it.

That is not a reason to feel bad. It is a reason to spend one hour differently.

You are able to change one hour rather than a habit, and one hour has never once been too small a thing to be worth changing. Ecclesiastes 3:12 puts the good inside a life rather than in the whole account of one, and the Holy Spirit is the one who meets a person inside sixty minutes.

The phone in the bag for one hour

So here is the assignment, and it is one hour rather than a policy.

Put the phone in a bag for the first hour of the next day out. And do not take it out.

The first hour, deliberately, because that is when the good photographs happen and therefore when the pull is strongest. Not the last hour, when everybody is tired and nothing is happening anyway.

You are able to give up the best hour for photographs rather than the worst one, and doing it that way round has never once been you throwing anything away. Ecclesiastes 3:12 puts the good inside the life rather than in what gets kept, and the Spirit of God is with a woman zipping a bag on a Saturday morning.

In a bag rather than in a pocket. A pocket is not a decision. And say it out loud to somebody, once, so that it is a fact rather than an intention: my phone is in the bag for the first hour.

And then expect the pull, because it will come, and it will come about eleven times. And here is what to do with it, which is not resisting. When you notice something worth keeping, and the hand starts to move, say the thing silently instead. Name it in words to yourself. The way she is standing. The sound of that.

You are able to name a thing instead of capturing it, and naming it has never once been a smaller way of keeping it. It is written that the good is to rejoice and do good in his life, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is with a woman who has just noticed something and not reached for anything.

Naming it does something capturing does not, which is that it puts the thing inside you rather than in a file. And at the end of the hour you will be able to remember that hour from the inside, which is the thing you have not had in six years.