The holidays seem to create an extra frenzy of picture-taking and documenting by photograph all the quality time spent with family and friends.  Meals, get togethers, parties and other events usually bring forth many photograph opportunities.  Xanga, Myspace, Facebook, Flickr... they all have a healthy (or an over) dose of pictures that we can view and catch up on each others' lives without even really communicating.  I, too, like the rest of the world, have a digital camera and try to bring it around as much as I can, especially if I know there will be fun moments to capture.  Concerts, birthdays, weddings... I want to remember these times and be able to look back on them someday.  I come home after an event and almost like real-time, upload all my pics onto Facebook and hope that people see the good times that are ongoing. 

The other day, while uploading some pictures online, a thought dawned on me.  If someone formulates views of me by the pictures that I have posted, then he/she cannot possibly be getting the whole of who I am.  Because all of the pictures that I have up for the public to see... they're all "happy" moments.  Occasions that bring forth smiles and silly-ness and laughter.  It's true, life consists of a lot of these moments and we should celebrate them.  But life also consists of a lot of moments when I'm not smiling.  I might be crying.  Or angered.  Or annoyed.  But these moments never get captured by the camera and never get posted anywhere for anyone to see.  It makes a lot of sense.  Why would I want to remember the sad, incomplete, joyless moments of life?  Why would I try to capture these moments for memory's sake?  And why would I ever want to share that with the world?  Certainly, "Kodak" moments aren't meant to depict such darkness in life. 

But I think my view is changing.  It is valuable to remember the good times.  But also the dark times.  Because usually for me, the dark times make me more pointedly reflect on God, love, life and death.  And as painful as some of those dark experiences are, it's just as much a part of who I am as the good experiences.  And to leave the dark experiences to the fading memory that I have... well, I don't want them to just be distant occurences that I once wanted to completely erase from my memory.  I now want to remember them.  And grab onto the fact that they have also shaped me.  And in some instances, in much more of a defining way than other less painful experiences. 

I suppose I'm not exactly saying, 'let's take pictures of sad and depressing times of life,' but I am saying that maybe I should give it another thought and see how even through picture-taking and posting, I have tried to paint a veneer of a perfect life and tried so desperately to hide the brokenness that is so inherently a part of me.  From others.  And more so from myself.

Pictures and a faulty memory are all I have to remember the past.  And when I'm going Home, I don't want to look at an album full of photographs that portray a successful, happy, perfect little life.  Because life is not that.  Life is much more than Kodak moments.