NOT Capturing the Moment

Downward facing dog, honeybaked ham, and a writer's holiday commitment

Apologies that there’s no audio this week. I was on a train in the Silent car and one can only take so many dirty looks.

The other night, I was in my basement with my husband and kiddo. She was showing off her gymnastics, he was mimicking her gymnastics, and I was waiting for the inevitable injury that was bound to come from said gymnastics. All of a sudden, I looked over and saw my dogs like this…

The origin story of “downward facing dog”

I dove for my phone, laughing while I begged “Stay there. Don’t move. Hold it…” as my ancient iPhone took its sweet time opening my camera app, finally allowing me to get the shot.

I was pleased with myself. I now totally understand the inspiration behind “downward facing dog”. Butt in air. Chest towards floor. Okay, maybe your head isn’t being eaten by another 70-lb animal, but besides that, it could be a Daily Yoga pose card!

Later, tucked in bed half watching Love Actually, because Christmas 😏, half doing the nightly scroll through all the apps, this picture resurfaced. I smiled, remembering the moment.

Except…I was actually missing the moment when I took this picture.

The moment was with my daughter, who was yelling “Mom! Watch!” as she flipped over the pink bar in our basement. The moment was watching my husband attempt a kick and switch, all 6 feet 1 inch of him inverted, my dome light holding on to the ceiling for dear life as his heel came within inches of its face. The moment was teaching my daughter how to do a cartwheel on my knees, a life skill critical for playground popularity.

Instead, I was on my phone, trying to take a picture of my dogs, begging them, in fact, to hold the pose. I got out of the moment in order to take this picture.

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The holidays are fraught with moments. There is a strong impetus to have your phone close by if not in hand to ensure maximum capture. What if you miss the one second your kids are actually smiling on Santa’s lap instead of looking at the dude in fearful wonder or outright bawling or wearing out his ear with their Christmas list? What if that selfie of you and your husband in front of the tree doesn’t come out? We should take two. Or twelve. What if we don’t have that one family photo or the one book club photo or the one cookie exchange photo? How the fuck will we know what color sprinkles we used last year?!?

The ridiculous is obvious when explained this way. You can feel the eye roll. Except you do it too, so maybe its more of a slightly embarrassed eye shrug.

We want these moments to be indelible, preserved on our phones and our digital picture frames and our holiday cards. Proof that there is joy in our hearts and our homes, even if we had to redo it four times and threaten loss of tablets and promise adult beverages to get it.

The tricky truth here is that these moments would likely be even more indelible, more permanent, if we were fully engaged in them.

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My reading this week started with this lovely piece from Time Travel Kitchen. It’s a compilation of “ideas about food, drink or traditions people thought of at the holidays” and were willing to share with Jolene, the author. Reading this is the intellectual version of wrapping up in a blanket by the fire. You will feel your brain relax into the sweetness of the traditions, memories, and moments shared here. It inevitably opened the vault of my own holiday remembrance. Thumbing the rotating switch on the electric Moravian candles in each window as soon as the sun went down. Hearing the ancient KitchenAid mixer running late in to the night as my mother made another loaf of her famous banana bread. Laughing with high school friends who dropped by on Christmas night to snag a slice of Honey Baked ham or a piece of fudge as we laid out literally every piece of food left in the place for the taking.

This is not my family. Nor does it remotely resemble the hodge podge of food piled on to our kitchen table all around the ham. But it is an excellent example of what I’m talking about. Sit down already and eat!

When my mother died, my brother went through literally every picture in her house. There were plastic bins full of little envelopes of 4x6 shots carefully developed first at K-Mart and later at her local CVS. To my knowledge, there are no pictures of our Moravian candles. The banana bread was covered in aluminum foil and sherpa’d out the door with a ribbon and a card too fast to be captured on film. And by Christmas night, nobody gave a shit about pictures, so there aren’t any of a honey baked ham either.

I don’t need pictures for these memories. They are imprinted in my being, their feeling so palpable my body warms at the very mention of a KitchenAid. Those were moments captured by my soul, not my camera. Joy that requires no reminder.

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I don’t have any bright ideas about how to magically stop this practice, how to intentionally NOT capture the moment. But what I’ve noticed, when I’m fully engaged in noticing and not being a complete hypocrite, is how much more interested I am in the story than the picture. The picture may be click bait, but the story, well, that’s the magic behind the moment. The pictures in Jolene’s compilation are lovely, yes, but most of them are Getty Image’s interpretation of another human’s story. The perfect cracks in the cookies are pretty but not the point; the cookies themselves and how they came in to being and who helped form them and why those particular cookies are the point. How can we capture that?

As a young teenager, I loved looking through old photographs at my great aunt’s house in Mechanicsville, VA. She and my great uncle lived together on a small peach orchard on this no-name road right outside of Richmond. Besides the hair styles and classic cars, the confusing fact that the women and girls wore exclusively dresses, and the proof that my parents, grandparents, and great aunts and uncles were actually young once, the thing that most captured my attention about the photos was on the back. Each picture had a hint of a story scrawled in tight cursive hiding at the top or bottom of the back of each photo.

“June 1958, Kinston, Nell and Bonnie”

“August 1963, Picking peaches, Melinda”

“Christmas 1978, Me and Ben at the Tree Lighting”

I’d read the descriptions, imagination flying as I tried to fill in the gaps of the story. Why did this particular moment between my mom and her sister matter? What was so special about Melinda picking peaches this summer day? Was it a holiday tradition for Ben and Jo to go to the tree lighting or had they gone just this once? The moment was there…indelible in its black and white and then Polaroid form…but the story wasn’t.

So my focus this Christmas (my holiday of choice, but fill in what feels right for you) will be to concentrate on capturing the story, not the moment. And like any good writer, in order to illuminate the story, I will first have to fully immerse myself in it.

There is amusement in capturing the moment, satisfaction, and sometimes even relief. But I’ve never felt joy when hitting the big white circle at exactly the right moment. Joy, I believe, lives in the shot, so to experience it, you must be there too.

My wish for you as you enter this holiday season is to be a main character in the story. Dedicate your full self to absorbing the moment. Be intentional about NOT capturing it, at least on camera. Seize it with your heart instead, allow your cellular (biologically not Verizon-y) being to imprint the moment in a place and time far more permanent than even the best of cloud storage. Be unforgettable. Allow the moment to be unforgettable.

This holiday, be the photo you’ve always wanted to share on Instagram. Write the story on the back and fill in the details. Then cuddle up on your couch with the joy of that moment, toast it with hot chocolate, and let it wrap its warmth around you. You’ll remember it next year. And the year after that.

I promise.

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I’m heeding my own advice and taking next week to capture memories with my person not my phone, so I will not be sending out a newsletter next Wednesday. BUT, I will be back in your Inbox on New Years Day with a joy💣 to start the year off right!