A camera in your head

Managed to muck up my lower back this morning. Haven’t done that in a long time. Means haven’t found pics for this post so this will have to do.

On a visit to my parents at least 25 years ago, and probably longer, she and I went for a walk (with the dog) around the development in which they lived. It was a place outside of Detroit: big houses on fairly large plots of land. Big front and back gardens, long drives. Really, the only reason you would find it is if you lived there (or had been given directions because you were visiting or delivering something). Which is to say it was very quiet. You hardly ever saw other people during walks. Certain times of year you’d see ducks or other birds but that was basically it.

Anyway, on said walk I must have seen something unusual because I think I said I wish I has a camera so I could remember that. My mother turned to me (dog probably did too because my mother was the favourite  of every dog we ever had and whatever my mother did, the dog did it too) and said, “you have a camera in your head – use it”.

Her point was if you try hard enough you can implant a memory of something. You don’t need other means of recalling a favourite image etc.

It’s a comment that has stayed with me for a long time.

I love tech – MacBook, iPad, iPhone (even have a PC laptop as well). Ninety-five percent of the time when I leave the house I’ve at least got the phone with me. My work life is based around emails so I need something on me that enables me to access mail – even when I’m out and about I need to be able to say to the guy I work for ‘yes, I can take that in an hour’.

However, when I walk the dog (once or twice a day) and do my solo walk I don’t take my phone. Those outings are informed by my mother’s comment from years ago. There’s always something to see and remember on these outings – even if it’s just a young rabbit bopping across a lane, different flowers, ancient oaks growing out of the Devon banks – you get the idea.

And every once in a while something pops up that requires stopping and taking a serious look and imprinting the image on the camera in my head. In the past month, that’s been a fawn at dusk in the middle of a lane (even the dog knows you stop and stand very still if you see something like that – after all, he was raised in a semi-rural area: you do not chase non-dog beings of any sort [plus he’s afraid of cats]); the other was a little egret sitting on a fence in the middle of a hot afternoon.

I definitely make use of my camera phone but generally that’s for more mundane things (like trying to come up with a banner photo for that week’s Posse post or taking a pic of a job posted in a shop window for my son).

So what about you? Are you a selfie maven or an unreconstructed luddite (no phone at all), or somewhere in-between?