“Don’t take pictures on your phone!” my relative snapped.
The harsh command hung in the air as I stood there, phone still raised, trying to capture what should have been a simple family moment.
His persistence was puzzling until my wife reminded : he had been nursing a grudge over an unshared photo from six years ago.
Pissed as I was at this display, I stepped back and offered him the camera.
But as the heat of the moment faded, deeper questions surfaced:
What drives our obsession with capturing every moment?
Here was someone so haunted by an unshared memory that he’d forgotten how to be present in creating new ones. In his gallery of grievances, he valued the missing photo more than the moment unfolding before us.
They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but what’s the value of those thousand words when you can’t speak a few kind ones in the moment?
Later, when asked if I was okay, I said I was fine, explaining how anger, like sweat on a hot day, comes naturally - but also passes.
I was reminded that I need not respond to such brashness; the universe has its own elegant way of balancing accounts, returning to each of us the energy we choose to put out into the world.