The past three months have held some incredible twists and turns – some exhilarating, others less so. I’ve been busy behind the scenes working on more projects than I’d normally cram into such a short time span. This knocked blogging down a few pegs on the priority list, though it was never far from my mind. I wanted to take a moment though, and write about taking time for things.
For all things. Taking time for work, taking time for rest, taking time to write things down we want to remember. Taking time to relish the things and people we love, taking time to bake, taking time to call someone we haven’t spoken to in awhile.
As a photographer, I spend a lot of time talking about the importance of taking time now to photograph things you want to remember later. It’s just as hard for me as anyone else to do this. But like anyone, I’m always grateful to unearth images that I decided to create. It feels triumphal, as though I was able to salvage something from the flood of time. Like this image of my grandmother holding her wedding photo, sitting in the house she lived in with my grandfather before he passed away. I have many images from that particular afternoon – of her holding her beloved spinning wheel, bobbins of yarn she spun from wool herself, the sundry items around her house that I remember seeing as a child. They remind me now of many other afternoons I spent at her house, watching Shirley Temple movies or sitting on her back patio eating ice cream with sun-warmed raspberries straight from her garden.
Although I’m indescribably grateful that I took time to take these photos, I also don’t have to feel guilty if I’m not doing it every day. A handful of images can well represent the thousands more stored in my memory – it’s just that when some are fixed into pictures, it helps the rest remain undimmed and unclouded by unreliable memory.
We don’t have to pull out the camera every single day, or call long-lost friends every single day, or blog, or bake, or write postcards, or any other good thing every single day. The point is, rather, that we need to take time to do such things. “Take” implies that it’s intentional, you’re doing it on purpose, not just “waiting until you have the time” or seeing if life leads you around to doing it. The urgent will always crowd out the important, and unfortunately, urgent things aren’t usually scrapbookable or bloggable.
Urgent stuff doesn’t care about what you’ll want in five years, it cares about NOW. Urgent things bully us into neglecting friendships, foregoing happy afternoons, or creating something that will be best enjoyed later. Urgent things convince us that because we didn’t have time to do that important thing yesterday, there’s no sense in bothering with it today, either. Meanwhile, important things wait, but eventually slip away. Some stories we only get one chance to write.
Please, this week, take time to do something important. It doesn’t matter what it is – whether it be repainting that wall that drives you crazy every day, or finally hanging up that art print you found three years ago, or calling your college roommate who you haven’t seen in awhile. Take the time, and you’ll find that it takes less time than you thought. Schedule it in, and refuse to let anything crowd it out. The urgent will always be there, the important will not.
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