The following was originally published on August 25, 2021—just our second ever post. At the time we had 12 subscribers. Today, we reshare this revised and expanded exploration of being present and joy with the other 4,092 of you. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe as you see fit.
We do not have photographs of our most joyous experiences. And if we tried to photograph them, we would simultaneously and rather ironically prevent their occurrence. This is because the best moments originate in spontaneity.
When I looked at my 12-year-old daughter, earlier this year, she seemed, in that moment, inexplicably taller than the little human being I used to carry in a baby sling while preparing meals and taking care of household chores. So I figured I better take the opportunity, right then, to hold her like a baby before she got so big I might not have strength enough to do it again. She playfully indulged me, and we smiled, laughed and hugged. I didn't ask my son to grab my phone or snap a photo. Had I done that we would have started to pose or stepped outside of the full aliveness of the moment. (The same problem might well occur with talking to each other if we tried to record our most meaningful conversations.)
The problem with our photos is that they are usually mementos of premeditation and tend not to capture the authentic aliveness in organic occurrences of life. And maybe that is as it ought to be. Aliveness is an expression of oneness with the living world. Such a creative communion cannot, after all, be captured, contained, or possessed. It can only be experienced. Even our best art can only refer or point to life. Only we can genuinely exemplify it. That is to say, only we can be alive. And the joy we seek is there, and only there, in “being” fully alive.
The desire to capture or possess our most cherished experiences—to make “memories”—at the expense of being fully in the present speaks to an ongoing conflict within us between “having and being,” as Erich Fromm has explained it in To Have or to Be (1976). The “having” way of life emphasizes acquisition and possession of things rather than authentic and sustained encounters or participation in life. Through this mode of unliving we identify with and define ourselves through our possessions: we are what we have or what we possess.
“Aliveness is an expression of oneness with the living world. Such a creative communion cannot…be captured, contained, or possessed. It can only be experienced.”
Fromm found the having-being distinction salient early in his intellectual life. In Escape From Freedom (1941), Fromm explained why he thought living centered on possession was as commonplace as it was misguided.
“There is no genuine strength in possession as such, neither of material property nor of mental qualities like emotions or thoughts. There is also no strength in use and manipulation of objects; what we use is not ours simply because we use it. Ours is only that to which we are genuinely related by our creative activity, be it a person or an inanimate object. Only those qualities that result from our spontaneous activity give strength to the self and thereby form the basis of its integrity. The inability to act spontaneously, to express what one genuinely feels and thinks, and the resulting necessity to present a pseudo self to others and oneself, are the root of the feeling of inferiority and weakness. Whether or not we are aware of it, there is nothing of which we are more ashamed than of not being ourselves, and there is nothing that gives us greater pride and happiness than to think, to feel, and to say what is ours.”
Only by authentically attending life do we experience fulfilment, the deepest of satisfaction. We often lose the attentiveness required for joy when we treat the present as a mere stepping stone to a future joy. We tend to memorialize experiences too soon—while we are still in their midst.
The “being” approach to life, by contrast, centers on mindful, reverent encounters with the intrinsically valuable—the ends rather than the means of life. In the being-mode we identify with what we are or exemplify rather than what we have or possess. Being, in this sense, is active, attentive, authentic participation in life.
When one is in the being state of existence, “one neither ‘has’ anything nor ‘craves’ to ‘have’ something, but is joyous, employs one’s faculties productively, is ‘oned’ to the world,” as Fromm put it in To Have or to Be. The being orientation is the flowering of our fullest self—our greatest human power, potency.
The being mode of existence is what we experience when we are in beautiful, spontaneous communion with the world. When a beautiful creature unexpectedly lands on a leaf before our eyes and we pause in joyful appreciation; when our child makes a comment that bursts forward with special meaning given what we know of them; when an electrifying conversation unexpectedly erupts between two friends, lasting an hour but feeling like only minutes; when, as we close our window blinds at dusk, we pause in appreciation of a delightful cotton candy sky.
“Most of us can observe at least moments of our own spontaneity which are at the same time moments of genuine happiness,” wrote Fromm in In Escape From Freedom.
“Whether it be the fresh and spontaneous perception of a landscape, or the dawning of some truth as the result of our thinking, or a sensuous pleasure that is not stereotyped, or the welling up of love for another person—in these moments we all know what a spontaneous act is and may have some vision of what human life could be if these experiences were not such rare and uncultivated occurrences.”
You know the other examples. They stand out. So much, so, that we sometimes break with the moment and try to “capture” them. But in doing so we gain a possession—be it a memory, social media post, or tangible photograph—at the expense of (being present in) the experience.
More often than not, our photos are distractions and distortions. In many instances, the taking of photos is an interruption of our best moments. Craving eternity, we seek to hold onto or prolong these joyful moments. But these photographic interventions, ironically, insert time into timeless moments of joy. And such timeless moments are our only actual encounter with eternity.
We frequently prioritize the hope of “securing” an experience over being fully present in the experience. Just consider the scene at most concerts. We permit our camera lens to narrow our focus on a particular performer to the exclusion of the people singing around us or the other musicians on different sides of the stage. Our cameras cannot dance across the stage and scan the singing crowd the way our eyes working in coordination with our brains can. A concert viewed through our phone’s lens is a concert watched through a security camera.
More than diminishing our experience, the photos we take can sometimes blatantly falsify our own past. A family of northerners attends a Florida theme park in the wilting summer heat. The children complain as they wait in lines ten times longer than the length of the ride. The parents are shocked by the mounting costs. None of these details are recorded in the family’s digital photo album featuring staged smiles that disguise boredom, exhaustion, and irritability. The same is true of the social media selfie of a smiling couple on a dinner date. Behind the camera, their relationship fraying from incompatibility, indifference, and neglect. These photos are closer to propaganda than genuine pictures of reality, convincing our future selves of an illusory past filled with joy.
We rarely photograph our disappointments, discomforts, disgust, and sadness. This is a realization wise to recall when, after a perfectly reasonable break-up, a social media or photo app inundates us with a stream of photos “evidencing” just how apparently “happy” we were with our ex. (Perhaps documenting misery is the one area of life where we really do lack sufficient photography.)
The photographs we use to “capture” the present, and later to recall the past, fail on both accounts. The authentic present cannot be “captured,” it must be lived and felt. And the photographs we usually take do not reflect the deepest joy life offers us. Better to develop a disciplined love of spontaneity that habitually inclines us to be in the present and not to break with the moment for a photo op.
Admittedly, photos can remind us of treasured experiences. Our faulty memories frustrate us, and photos of past experiences not only remind us of the past but also transport us there, too. This is especially true, ironically, if the photographed experience was one we were fully present for.
Most of us are never going to put away our cameras for good. After all, we sometimes take photos that we cherish for years to come—photos that help us not only recall but relive important experiences. But we should consider how much we lose—and even distort—in picking up our cameras for “memory’s sake.” Compulsively videoing and photographing our experiences can come at the expense of those very experiences.
Too many of our photos and videos interrupt the beauty or joy we ostensibly seek to document or preserve. Perhaps we would all do well to turn fleeting moments into eternal joyous encounters with the dynamic living world—to put the camera down and work at being more fully present.
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