Why We Ought to Keep Making Instagramemories
By: Jois G.
Tags: Memories, Life Lessons, Presence, Social Media, Life

Why We Ought to Keep Making Instagramemories

They’re so much more than just fabulous filters and #hashtags

My life is pretty, I decide, almost every time I scroll through my Instagram feed.

I bet yours is too, if it’s based off social media.

That exercise of scrolling through Instagram is probably today’s equivalent of having “our lives flash past before our eyes,” complete with appropriate filters to convey moods and dispositions at the time, plus a caption for context.

But what exactly is it we’re sharing and archiving?

At the times when we do stop racing through our photo streams (also a loose metaphor for how we live our days?), and actually look more closely at certain images or to read what we had captioned is also when we would remember the story-behind-the-photo can be quite different from what was shared.

Sometimes we know exactly why we take the photos we do, other times, we just got to let them sit for a while.

Here’s a breakdown of my main categories of photo and behind-and-beneath-the-scenes. How would yours differ?

Pictures of what, or who, drives us — daily, ferociously, unrelentingly. Perhaps, a ‘state of happiness’, or singular inspirations.

What makes the bulk of my collections are really photos borne out of love, but taken out of a primal sort of Fear-Of-Missing-Out, a poor attempt to hold on to time and life that’s slipping by too quickly.

A picture of my kids lost at play is also the same moment I’m wondering why I keep forgetting that they’re only children and expect them to be able to be responsible for their own tasks.

Sometimes, I even remember to take a picture when they’re upset or crying, because I know someday, I will forget that equally precious detail, and have only a hoard of pictures of them laughing, upbeat, excited and euphoric.

What I cannot capture is how it fills me with certain sorrow knowing that the moment that I’ve just captured will never, ever return. They will never go back to being that person who runs into my arms and loves me with such complete bursting force.

We can only do our best and in this case, it’s to build up a vault of memories for the later years.

Pictures of milestones unlocked, accomplished, celebrated

But what I hope to remember: What went behind each of those achievements — the endless entreaties, the pleas and bargains, the encouragement and threats… that all go unheeded until such time that their inner lamps get switched on and they decide to go ahead on their own terms.

It’s really not just the kids’ achievements. The adults too, learn very valuable lessons — each of us reaching quite different milestones on our own journeys.

Somehow, there’ll always be food, particularly those that are #homecookedwithlove

But I’ve never recorded the prayers we utter before meals, and how we remember the children who have no family and food, and how I tell the kids to finish their meat “because an animal has died for us.” The hope is that along the way, they learn to give thanks, pay it forward, change the world… or become conservationists. It’s so much more than ingredients that go into any one #homecookedwithlove meal.

“God Moment of the Day” pictures

After each one, I wonder if others think of me as someone with faith, or just another hypocrite because of what I post and perhaps, how I live my life a bit more carelessly than religiously.

Like a hopeless pendulum out of control, I tend to swing towards a black-and-white morality and the zillion shades of grays of life. There is a dichotomy between faith and life that is all at once, to me both invisible and also way too clearly demarcated.

In this struggle, sometimes, I don’t see the good but in the moments that God reveals Himself, I do ravenously try to capture it and that gets me through the next hump.

Truth is, the God Moments exist, everyday; it’s just whether I pay close enough attention to those moments unfolding.

That significant other

A while ago, a friend had said about my husband and I that “You guys make a great couple.” Well, thanks! My response — we make a good couple. Not great, but good, and that’s because we work really hard at it.

You’ll never see a photo of my husband and I fighting, working things out, reconciling, negotiating… you won’t see us angry and frustrated, wanting to give in to the desire to throw the towel in, you’ll never see the tears cried or the text messages exchanged, and you’ll never know just how much hard work we put in to hold on to each other. I’m not suggesting that all married couples exist with such strife, but we do because of our characters and personalities but you’ll never see those photos because to stop at those moments to take a picture would be just, well, plain weird.

And that’s why we can make a brilliant, awesome, wonderfully good couple. In the existential state of our everyday, it’s hard to pause and see it. But when I do take that pause, I do notice that some glorious messes can actually make rather exceptionally pretty pictures.

The best part is this: In this case, there’s no need to remember the disasters that we make in our marriage, at all. We only have to remember the victories we won at the end of the day. This is the one scenario where it’s perfectly okay to let the negatives go.

Selfies

Long before we had inverted cameras and smartphones, we were attempting to capture pictures of ourselves within a projected space in front of the camera we’re holding away from us, so what’s wrong with selfies?

They are our best shot at capturing our own inner world of the moment.

I take a selfie (or wefie) with my kids to catch a “We were here!” mood or just because at that moment, I realise all over again just how much I love them, or how much they mean the world to me, and how nothing else compares to having them right there at that moment.

I also take a selfie on good hair days.

Sometimes, I take a selfie when I’m in a pensive mood and have touched the hem of sorrow.

Or when I’m at a particular place, or having a specific drink, or seeing a story in my surrounding that I want to be a part of, or when I’m with my people, my tribe, my community Just. Because.

I take a selfie and sometimes not even I know what I’m thinking, feeling, pining for, planning for, hoping for, and it’s okay because maybe I just needed to reside quietly in that moment and let the ‘why’ surface later, which they usually do.

The missing photos

There just aren’t many photos of date nights, or time spent with friends or one another.

On the occasion that there are, like me holding my extra large popcorn waiting for Avengers: Endgame, is how I mark a milestone to signify the end of an era, to be a part of this one moment in time together with the rest of the world.

“I was here,” is what I’m saying.

For now, I still am.

What you see, and what you don’t

You see: Family photos. Some happy shots. Vacation photos. All the good and wonders of it all. I am blessed, and I know that.

There is a different dimension to it too.

What you don’t see: Expectations I had, personal hopes and dreams that have come to naught, the options I had given up.

These photos don’t exist because I’m a mother, like many others, who have had to leave certain pieces of ourselves behind. Truth is, regrets do creep up, desires do flare up and we do wonder, “What if?”

But I continue to hope that decades later, I will still believe that these are not sacrifices but choices I made.

The sum of the parts

And this is where maybe we get a more complete picture than if we were to look at each singular shot.

Perhaps what counts is the effort to make meaning of another day and to attribute purpose to brand new experiences and moments.

It’s all these little mosaic pieces of our lives that combined, may just complete our personal time capsule to say, “We Were Here.”