How true, how true.  In the 70s and the 80s I owned a great old Pentax film camera and I was very much into photography.  I spent a lot of time recording life as it went by and documenting all my shows, special events, friends and family in slide transparencies.

I collected reel after reel of photographs that began to fill a closet.  For whatever reason in the 90s, I stopped, and the closet of my past photographic memories began to collect dust.

When the Missus and I bought a second home in the mountains of Colorado, those memories were transported from NYC to another closet in Colorado with hopes that they would all be some day better organized.

That was never accomplished.  I was able to build 6 albums of paper pictures of life, career, friends and family, but I just never got around to the slides.  I even have an old still-working slide projector that trudges on. 

Recently, after selling the house in Colorado, I hauled this slide library out of storage, had it sent back to NYC and began to dig into the task deciding to weed through around 3000 slides, sort out the focused from the blurry and transfer them all to digital media and organize on a hard drive.

I’m a little nervous about doing this and then throwing all the slides away, because who knows what kind of digital software will work for these new digital pictures over the next 50-100 years.  How many times will I yet have to transfer them to another media?  The future is uncertain, but I have absolutely no closet space for over 3000 slides, so I’m taking a deep breath and doing it.

For the past couple of weeks I’ve spent an hour each night in the wee hours sitting alone in the dark watching my life go by.  It’s been a trip!  The pictures have triggered memories that I haven’t thought of in decades.  I’ve re-united mentally with friends long since forgotten, re-lived shows that I no longer even remembered and wept at events that inspired my life and decided my future.

These picture memories have been so powerful that the watching of them, the re-visiting of the past, has instilled in me the notion to change my life and get it back on course.  They have helped me see myself, my life, in a kind of newsreel synthesis and, based on the past, look at the present and be able to ascertain how I’ve gotten away from the natural course of my life.

I really needed this event to happen.  It has been like a gift from God, a light from above in the form of colors and symbols on a white wall reminding me of who I am, of my goals and purpose in life, of my dreams and aspirations.  These past few weeks have been a steady reminder through this summary experience that I need to cut away the dross from my life and get back (or forward) to the dreams that I had and have pursued.

These symbols of moments in time have riveted me back to my dream.  They have touched me with the beauty of friendship, family and musical performance and inspired me to pursue my own course with much more focus.  The experience has changed my life.

The act of stopping the forward movement of life and holding on to a moment in time by taking a picture of that moment is a pretty interesting human invention.  No other living thing does this.  Animals don’t; plants don’t.  They just go merrily on with life.  But we are blessed with memory and have even invented an amazing technological way of recording those memories in light and color.

These snapshots of life’s precious moments are truly each worth a thousand words.  Reeling through decades of a life in a matter of hours is an amazing way of seeing the whole in a flash and grabbing the sum total of life in images projected on a wall.  It set me straight.  It pointed the way.  It put my life in perspective through its subliminal and obvious messages.

These symbols of experience clarified the course of my life.  I’m grateful for the illumination.  I recommend the adventure.

Take the time to get out that old scrapbook, that pile of pics up in that dusty closet, and review the iconic moments of your life.  For me it was a life-changer.

For more inspirational music, thoughts and ideas from Peter Link,
please visit Watchfire Music.