There’s something special about putting your cell phone away, and grabbing your twenty year old digital camera that’s barely hanging on. It’s reminiscent of a time when presence is all that was asked of you. It’s reminiscent of a time when the pace of life was slower.
The first frame is my favorite.
Not because of the view or the stunning backdrop. Not for the colors of the sea, or for the crowds, but for its simplicity.
Three chairs against a white wall, aprons draped over them like a pause in someone’s day.
I imagine an abuela and abuelo there, maybe with their daughter or son, maybe a grandchild.
She’s just stepped out from the kitchen after a morning of cooking, passing down her most-loved recipes, he’s returned from tending the garden or errands in town. They sit together, looking out at the same view that has me in awe.
Maybe they gossip about the neighbours, maybe they bicker over something small, or maybe they sit in that easy silence that only comes after a lifetime together.
I wonder if they see the beauty that I do, or if it’s simply become the backdrop of their days. I wonder about the lives they’ve lived, and if they reminisce the way I know I will of these days.
It’s a simple frame, but it tells a whole story. It tells many stories. Where life and slowness and presence intertwine to become a life well lived. Despite the magnificence that people travel far and wide to see, it’s a humble life. There is no pretence, no facade. It simply just is.
I think about other lives a lot. Not in envy, but in a curious way.
It is a wonderful thing to leave the familiar behind. To hear the world, taste the world, feel the world and see the world in a lens that feels a little more undone and a little less polished.
It’s an unlocking of the senses in a way you’ve never done before. The familiar of your day to day is washed away by the unknown. You’re suddenly pulled out of the routine that causes everything to blend into one, so much so that you can’t tell days apart.
Your perspective becomes that of an old digital camera.
The perfection of it remains, because it simply is that. And at the same time, it is imperfect, blurry. Your view, once pulled out of the cycle you’ve become so accustomed to, is shaken up. The reality of these lives that feel so far away, are as mundane as your own life back home.
All it takes is that single frame with three chairs against a white wall with aprons draped over them. And you realize that you found someone else’s familiar. You found someone else’s day that seems extraordinary to you, but to them, it simply blends into every other.
We yearn for what others have, others yearn for what we have. But it’s simply all perspective. Life isn’t the perfectly captured picture. It’s the grainy digital camera that offers a different point of view.
And something about these small, ordinary moments makes me think about the shape of a life—how our days stretch and shrink depending on the season we’re in. How in our twenties, everything feels like a beginning. How at forty, we’re searching for meaning in the middle. How at seventy, we might look back and see it all as one long thread of ordinary days we didn’t realize were extraordinary at the time. Maybe that’s why scenes like this move me. Because they collapse time. They remind me that no matter where we are, we’re all just living through a series of “everydays” that eventually become the story of our life.
At our firsts breath and in our oldest age, in our purest innocence, or after we’ve been dealt every hand, when life has yet to begin, or when it’s coming to an end.
Be it skyscrapers that touch the clouds or mountain views that descend into the sea, we’re simply all the same—waiting for the next thing to that will set tomorrow apart.
Melody
So so beautiful
What a refreshing & inspiring perspective 🤍