If faith is required for the present, then hope exists for the future. We hope for things unseen. We hope for better circumstances, for continuity, for dreams to come to fruition.
Hope can remain unwavering or pop like soap bubble.
February 1, 2019
Recently I both my old lap top/kids' laptop and one of my external hard drives both kicked the bucket unexpectedly. Things work until they don't. Of course, I had photos on both that weren't backed up to anything else. Some of you at this point will criticize me for not having my dearly beloved data linked up to the virtual cloud somewhere out there. If you do, I am guessing that you're either more tech savvy than me or have newer technology at your disposal. Maybe a millennial?
Either way, it doesn't change the fact that my photos are phantoms or maybe they already were... Virtual existence requires physical back up. Where does that cloud drift of to anyways? Who's yard does it sit over? Questions for another day and tangent.
In any case, I've spent enough time the last week of snow days backing up what I do have to a new external hard drive. Also pondering, why if I love these snap shots of my children's childhoods, why I didn't take the time to print some pics of the last few years? That part is easy. I didn't allow myself the time to use them in the way I intended. I just squirrelled them away on in a little digital box to deal with another day when I had the time and money to use them. Another decision arriving out of my inability to find that legendary money tree-then we would have been golden. :) If you learn that trick of alchemy, I'd love to know your secret.
We are a family of more than one computer. (Thankfully, so part of my photo archive survives and does have cloud connections. Hmmm.) I have my own laptop. Something very different than when I was young. I remember getting our first computer. It was a mid 90s Mac and it held a whopping 4 megabytes from what I remember. One present photo's worth of 1s and 0s.
My teenage children picture this kind of existence something terrible, the dark ages of disconnectedness, beyond the birth of dawn of slowwwww internet. Needless to say, our methods of operation are a little different. Need to find something out? They turn to a search engine for information without a second thought. My instinct was to head to the library for a book, my own personal collection or the local public location. I am a book worm. Now days, I use the web, but I've got to check a few sites to make sure the information jives. Can't help it. I don't simply trust the source. Who knows where it springs from?
It's pandora's box. It's the wild west. I exaggerate. Ideas being shaped and reshaped, beautiful and shocking. Adapt or die as fast as climate change. Paradigm shifts on a daily basis as we all connect or disconnect to drift along our own tethers, close, but not really connecting. As the stormy surge of tech surpasses the rate at which our minds and our wallets can process, the uphill climb to a non-native techie seems daunting.
I would rather be outdoors, immersed in sunshine and or reading a complexly woven story than trudging through web pages how to use new software, bleggh. (There's computer logic and then there's the logic of the written instructions which sadly often is not so pure. If you don't know pathway and you aren't a computer programmer, good luck! It's a few hour sacrifice as you wade through help pages.
My malfunctioning umbilical cord to all things virtual has left me checking out what remains of my intranet connections at home and pooling my various virtual annals together (otherwise known as various dinosaur tech according to my son) to form an organized photo archive (before my other hardware becomes extinct).
The angst over the images I have lost has past and I've spent the last few days enjoying the photos that I do have. Reminiscing with my teenagers over their more tender years when the world was small and the yard was big brought more than a few good laughs. Those were precious times. I got to show them the simple things of life, as their first impressions of the broader world formed. Parenting another life is a powerful thing and an important bestowal. We are stewards to another generation. The era before my kids had cell phones and video games was wonderfully simpler, precious, when an emerging bubble from a wand and some dish soap was a miracle to witness, when their little minds came up with imaginative and astute observations that left me giggling or amazed. Some kind of magic! A treasure to behold. I'm not saying it all was golden, not by a long shot. We've lived through some tough times, more medical stuff than I care to think about. (I still get emotional thinking about it.)
As I looked over the thousands of digital photos, I can say with gratitude, we had some good times. My kids have had a wonderful childhood and they are loved. We may not have done many fancy things since I stayed home with them, but we had some good fun just being together. Stuff doesn't equate to love anyways. I'm talking in your own yard sand box, water fight, paper and glue, running around in the sunshine kind of fun. It's that fun of just spending a moment together and laughing over something simple. I hope the memories of that love help buoy them through the tough stuff in life.
We may have lost a few photos, but those moments still happened and in the end, sometimes it's better to put the camera(or cell phone) away and just be in the moment. Be there with them. That's what my kids hopefully will remember, if not the details, the sense that they are loved. Photos make great memory prompts. Celebrate life 'cause time pours out like water out of a basin. There's great beauty in its complexity and simplicity. Moments can't be bottled and stowed away for later, only snap shots. Hugs in the present are better medicine.
Maybe I'll print a few photobooks worth of happy times, something tangible as a memory backup. I am still holding out hope some of my photos can be resurrected from the damaged hard drives...
