Visible, and Invisible
The present and the past are visible. The future is not. Obvious enough — no matter how much we think about the future, it remains imaginary. We can’t actually see it.
But it turns out the past isn’t so visible either. It’s only by putting time between yourself and it that certain things come into view. No matter how calmly you thought you were living through something, there are things you simply didn’t notice. Thinking about it in terms of yourself — that’s proof you were working through it by feel, by instinct. And often, it’s only later that you realize — oh, that’s what that was.
Seems like we need time to become calm. Maybe that’s why something like a journal is necessary. The act of writing itself becomes a way of putting time between yourself and the moment. Sometimes you notice something in the middle of writing; other times, it’s only reading it back later that the whole shape comes into view.
In that sense, photographs work surprisingly well too. Why that subject. Why that exact moment you pressed the shutter. Most of the time, you can’t explain it in the moment. Working by feel means exactly that.
The reasons sometimes catch up with you later. After two or three years, you can judge things calmly. What you were thinking back then, what you were unsure about. When the person who took the photo looks at it, their own sense and thinking at the time is right there in the image.
Looking at an old photograph isn’t about reviewing the record itself — maybe it’s about looking back at yourself again, from a distance. Even the same event looks different depending on whether you look back today or a month from now.
The future is nothing but imagination — but the past, too, it seems, has something imaginary about it. Memory edits itself to suit us, and the judgments and feelings we had back then, we can’t fully remember or reproduce them now.
If that’s true, then the only certain thing is “now.” But even “now” — you don’t really know what you were doing until you look back on it later. Still, what matters is that “now” is real.
Taking time to become calm, I think, means living in the present while, at the same time, entrusting this moment to a slightly later version of yourself. There are things we can see, and things we can’t. I’d like to keep valuing not just what’s visible, but what isn’t, too.