Just Me Being Me: Taking Mental Snapshots
I’ve never been able to get back and relive those mental snapshots, those encapsulated and distilled split seconds of bliss that I keep filing away in my head with such care and professionalism.
Just Me Being Me is literally just me being me, living my life outside my comfort zone when it happens as it happens. Since I’m a dedicated introvert, this doesn’t happen much, which makes it doubly interesting when it does. Full disclosure: This is something I wrote on January 1, 2010. I was reminded of it because I’d been taking “mental snapshots,” as I’ve been calling them, the past few days.
It happens more often than I realize. I can be in the middle of anything—squeezed into the back seat of a taxi on the way home from work, waking up next to my fiance on a lazy Saturday, even just watching TV by myself—and the urge to stop and take everything in overwhelms me.
This is a habit I’ve had since childhood, and for all the years I’ve been doing it, I have yet to get it quite right.
I take “mental snapshots” of points in time I think are perfect, when I feel I am truly happy and alive. The amazing thing about this is that whenever I find myself doing it, I feel like the luckiest person in the world to be experiencing pure and unadulterated joy in the smallest and simplest of moments.
The downside? When I’m done taking everything in and mentally archiving the figuratively bottled perfection somewhere in the recesses of my mind, I inevitably try to bring up and access the last time I came across an ideal specimen of nostalgia fuel.
The answer is always the same: I can never remember “the last time.” My fleeting bouts of pure happiness never survive the ravages of time! I remember the days when I was content or celebratory. I can even recount particular anecdotes. But I’ve never been able to get back and relive those mental snapshots, those encapsulated and distilled split seconds of bliss that I keep filing away in my head with such care and professionalism.
I pose this question: Is it because they weren’t perfect moments, to begin with?
Honestly, I’d rather believe that temporal tidbits such as those are by nature elusive, and can never be captured and properly preserved in any medium—even if it’s only in my memories.
Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash
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The definition of living in the moment 🙃 it’s a great skill that not many people can boast!