182 Days In The Life Of...

I ask you right here to please agree with me that a scar is never ugly. That is what the scar makers want us to think. But you and I, we must make an agreement to defy them. We must see all scars as beauty. Because take it from me, a scar does not form on the dying. A scar means “I survived”.

-Little Bee, in The Other Hand by Chris Cleave

http://poetryandvoyeurism.blogspot.com/2010/03/my-beyonce.html

There was a weekend in February, I have scarcely any recollection of it now, nor the three or four weeks that followed. I really don’t remember them that much at all. There are facts of course, things I know to be true: an accident, my girlfriend moving to Sydney the next day, visits to the hospital, the messy aftermath of an ambiguous break up, fights with the people I needed most. I see snap shots of all this, but they’re disjointed and out of order. It’s like trying to recollect a dream that leaves behind few clues, just an unnameable feeling and a sense of great significance.

There are other, different sorts of facts I’ve come to know since that weekend. Above all (unfortunately), I’ve learned that when the brain sustains an injury the healing is agonisingly slow for those waiting by the bedside. It’s like watching someone wake up in the morning in slow motion, only what should happen in a matter of minutes takes months. If a part of the brain cannot be salvaged the body sometimes has the ability to transfer certain functions to other parts of the brain and essentially “rewire itself”, connecting and creating neurons in different ways so that the body can carry on. In a way the heart does the same. Sometimes it breaks so badly, it will never work the same way again; there are parts of it that will never heal. Yet no matter how disfigured and scarred the heart may be, it continues to beat. Somehow, it finds a way to rewire itself and to carry on.

Inspired by Jamie Livingston who took a polaroid everyday for 18 years until his death in 1997, I’ve decided to do the same for 182 days (half a year) on a disposable camera. It helps in saving me from the hum drum blur of study and work and study and work and study and work that manages to swallow entire weeks before I even notice. There’s something very grounding in forcing myself to search for a moment each day that I feel worth photographing despite its perceived significance in the eyes of another. There is also something very powerful in recognising the little things that I would usually take for granted as part of my day.

I like the idea that the value of our lives does not lie in our achievements but is instead found in the day to day moments. Celebrating small moments by consigning the memory to a photo has quietly brought this idea away from some namby pamby mantra and into a firm mindset I carry. I guess, there’s probably something in that.

Anyway, these are some of my favourites so far that Idon’t particularly mind sharing: