I’m not going to be nauseatingly positive and tell you what measures you should take in life to make it better and what not. I think we have many Oprah and Deepak Chopra wannabes around us who love to tell us how life should be led and they are in fact amongst the most dysfunctional people otherwise. I’m happy with my own brand of dysfunction and hypocrisy. I’m not the epitome of perfection but I haven’t given up.
Last week, Larry Asego posted something on Facebook and I was taken by it completely. No it wasn’t a life changing quote or anything. It was a short video clip of how life is going on for all of as we are stuck to our phones. There’s just one woman in the entire video that isn’t on her phone while everyone else is, including kids at a playground. Special moments that should ideally be enjoyed and then maybe photographed are now photographed first and that special moment is lost in taking selfies or capturing what was actually happening then.
I’m guilty as sin for this. I have this compulsive need to take pictures, to document each and every moment and capture it with my phone camera and in the process I have realized I miss out so much. I went through the pictures and saw that while I was taking perfect shots of my kids birthdays because I feel I take better pictures than many, I’m nowhere in the pictures with my kids. That’s just one example and it seared my heart.
I have pictures of friends as we clink our glasses in unison to toast our friendship and as soon as the picture is done, instead of reveling on, all of us grab our phones and look in the photos folder to see how the pictures turned up and immediately start loading them on Facebook and Twitter. This is not an accusation – it’s a pathetic admission to what I actually do and I know of many who are just the same.
So let’s try and do this this year. Let’s try and give the phone and the camera a bit of a break. I’m not saying you kick cold turkey. If you spend horrendous amounts of time online on your device, start by reducing the time you’re on. Limit yourself by setting the timer on your fancy phone and adhere to that. Slowly increase the time between the usage, and soon enough you’ll see you’re using your device a lot less, unnecessarily.
I want to try and be more involved in things happening around me instead of having this need to capture everything in my phone camera. The pictures won’t bring back what I miss out and in a few years from now, when the kids have flown the nest and gone to start life on their own, I will be left all alone with my damn phone and camera and no one to take pictures of.
2014 is the year I will look up more often instead of look down at my device. I want to make beautiful memories this year to erase and reformat the area that’s filled with the horrors of Westgate from last year.
