Our Minds take the best pictures

​I'm certain you see this image, and read those words, and wonder what on earth is he going to write about here. Is he getting ready to rail on cigarette smoking? Well join the club. I'm not sure what I'm going to write about here. But be sure it's not an anti-smoking campaign.

I'm reading the book "Bravey" by Alexi Pappas - the distance running Olympian from Greece. I never read books without a pen and a notecard nearby to write down words that speak to me. I have exactly 4 bowls and 4 glasses in my home, and approximately 4,000 notecards laying around. 🤷‍♂️

For some reason yesterday, I found myself writing down the words you read below.

Each time I looked at that notecard, I found myself wondering, why those words? I think the answer is somehow found in the question - it's words. It's seeing and reading and feeling the power of words in our lives.

Pappas was 4 years old when her mom took her life by suicide. These words are a reflection she shares as one of four vivid memories she has of her mother. As I was reading Pappas write about a childhood memory, I was suddenly a 4 year old girl, staring at my mom, realizing she had never held me or kissed me.

In an instant, I could literally sit inside Pappas' memory. I could feel it and hurt for and with her. How can mere words do that...?

There is something powerfully and a bit miraculously sad about that, really.

I think I was also taken and maybe shaken by the power of the human mind. How it can hold on to images with such vivid detail. It's like our minds had smart phones in them long before smart phones and 4K and HD were ever things.

Is technology in a race to catch up with something the mind perfected long ago?

And it was a reminder, I suppose, as I pulled out that notecard and read it while Ian was practicing lacrosse last night. He walked over during a break and I handed him his water bottle he'd forgotten in the car. I wondered if his mind was taking pictures.

Pappas' words were a reminder that people are always taking pictures of our interactions with them. Maybe some of them go immediately into the deleted folder. And maybe some of them don't.

Many days life is very complicated and complex. But in many ways we are constantly breaking it down into pictures and words. Pictures and words that help us make sense of our own stories, pictures and words that help us share those stories with others.

I suppose there's some sadness that our minds aren't as good at editing photos as they are at taking them. But then again, maybe that's the point. Maybe it's designed that way, so that we ultimately lean into the hope that comes with the true gift of the mind.

The gift that says today is a new day, a new day for creating new words, and new photos....