The Campaign of Living

I’ve had to become very flexible in my advanced age.

I poke fun because, number one, it’s true. And number two, humor helps when you’re coming to grips with some of the realities of advancing to the next level of the game. You get there, look around, and discover that somebody has changed the controls.

There was a time when my brother and I would sit down with a game like Metal Gear Solid and work our way through the campaign. We were there for the story, the challenges, and that glorious payoff at the end.

After all those hours of figuring things out, getting things wrong, and trying again, you could finally sit back. Here came the music. Here came the cinematics. Everything you had been working toward unfolded on the screen.

And you had somebody there who had been through it with you.

I think about that more as I get older. The campaign. The company. The feeling that all those hours meant something.

I’m still playing, although my definition of success has changed. These days, rich means having food, paying my bills, and being able to go somewhere when I feel like going. My computer and my camera belong to me. They’re paid for. I have the space to make something, learn something, and figure out what I want to do with my time.

That is a blessing.

But I still want the cinematic parts. The moments with somebody I care about. The laughter, the gathering, the little scene I’ll want to revisit long after the day has passed.

The campaign, of course, is the living.

We go through different chapters, and we don’t all play them in the same order. School. Work. Marriage. Raising children. Starting over. Some chapters are ones we chose. Others arrive without asking.

There are campaigns through illness, through loss, through the death of a parent before we were ready to let them go. Experiences we would never have selected, yet somehow had to find our way through.

And throughout all that living, we take pictures.

Sometimes we know a moment matters when we press the shutter. Sometimes we’re just taking a picture at a cookout. Somebody looks up. Somebody laughs. We get everybody together for a few seconds before they wander off again.

Years later, that ordinary photograph may be the one we’re most thankful to have.

I remember going into somebody’s home and seeing a large portrait on the wall. You might not even know the person, but there they were, beautifully dressed, looking happy. You’d ask who it was, and somebody would tell you.

Then came the albums.

On the coffee table. On a shelf. Pages of people and places, with somebody nearby to fill in what the pictures couldn’t tell you.

That was the Instagram of my day. Somebody’s photo album was their feed. It was their life, or at least the parts they had gathered together to share.

We used whatever camera we had and did the best we could. We weren’t examining every little detail from six inches away. We were hoping the pictures came out.

You took your film to the drugstore and waited. Getting back twenty-four or thirty-six photographs you could actually see felt like a successful mission all by itself.

And then you chose. This one went into the album. That one went into a frame. Another went to somebody who needed a copy.

That is part of how we curate a life. We decide which moments to keep within reach.

The pictures don’t tell everything. A smiling face doesn’t explain every difficult day that came before it. Sometimes the same photograph brings laughter and grief because we remember how good it was to have that person there.

But there is solace in being able to look again. To sit with somebody, turn a page, and say, “Do you remember this?”

Maybe some of those cinematic moments become clear only when we return to them. A summer afternoon. A familiar face. Everybody together, before we knew how much that would mean.

And there they are.

Pieces of paper with memories on them.

Fit 2 capture. Fit 2 curate. Fit 2 print.