Carpe Diem

Interesting story in one of our local papers recently, about the short lifespan of home-cooked CD and DVD archives.
 
Most of us are pretty attached to our new digital cameras. Ecological and oh-so-economical all around, they have become essentials for our fragile memories and rushed lives. Instead of a pricey roll of 36 Kodacolor shots a few decades ago, we snap and transfer everything to hard disk drives minutes later -- very practical. The not-so-outdoorsy among us even spend cloistered weekends organising those shots into folders and subfolders, neatly transferred to writeable disks like CDs and DVDs, which cost almost nothing, nowadays. A good idea, or is it?
 
Digital storage experts finally have the word out. Those weekends where we were inside in the shade, safe from ultraviolet rays and excessive natural happiness, we wasted 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-styled housings. Five or ten years from now, when your kids have grown up and you're really aching for some innocent memories 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. Now, see what happens.
 
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.
 
Denis Guiet