Buddhism and the Family Album
Interesting story in one of our local papers yesterday. Nothing particularly new, but a smirking reminder about the short longevity of home-cooked CD and DVD archives.
Most of us are pretty attached to our new digital cameras. Ecological, user-friendly and oh-so-economical all around, they have become the engines of our sentimental memories and fragile lives. Taking pictures has never been so easy. Instead of a pricey roll of 12, 24 or 36 Kodacolor shots a few decades ago, we snap, snap and snap again, transferring everything to hard disk drives after we are done. It's practical and instantaneous, turning amateur photographers into professionals overnight. The picky-picky and not so outdoorsy among us even spend cloistered weekends organising all those shots into folders and subfolders, then neatly transfer it all to writeable disks of the CD or DVD variety. A noble pursuit, or is it?
Digital storage experts finally have the word out. Those weekends where other dads were out there on their bikes keeping fit, or playing a bit of baseball or street-hockey with their growing kids, and WE were inside in the shade, safe from ultraviolet rays and excessive happiness, we were wasting our time. Those neatly stored disks on the home office shelf are slowly getting eaten into oblivion, despite their expensive cases, protective sleeves and terminator housings. Five or ten years from now, when your kids have grown up and you're really aching for some sweet and innocent reminders of times permanently gone by, those disks will have gone to pot. Buddhists had told us to live in the Present Moment. We didn't listen.
I am as sentimental as the next guy, and so I will probably continue snapping pictures of my kids, hoping to preserve the past in these shaky times of atomic arsenals, melting glaciers and erupting volcanos. But now and then, in a brief moment of Buddhist enlightenment as I transfer a bunch of these shots to a hard disk drive, I will remind myself of the real meaning of those two letters, CD. Carpe Diem, I am sure.