“The only dream worth having is to dream that you will live while you’re alive and die only when you’re dead. […] To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.”
— Arundhati Roy, The Cost of Living
Last night, while watching the Olympics (multi-tasking!) I updated my Facebook page, which I hadn’t done in over a year. I also updated the photo of me on here.
While the photos we choose to represent ourselves online are also curated by us, online photos are, shall we say, carefully edited. Or scripted or public relations related or any of a million other things photos do. Although yes, now I have to uncomfortably look at myself when and if I log into Facebook, and then I just sit there typing while the me of the last week watches the me now.
Eventually I got down to the box where it asked me about my “Favorite Quote” and I put the above. It captures who I am better than any photo ever could and it reveals more about me, too. Noticing this, I then got annoyed that that particular box was all the way down at the bottom, when that box really should be at the top.
As instead of the photos we choose to show the world, the words we choose to hold dear and sacred enough to remember despite being barraged constantly with more and more and more words are what really define us.
The rest? Fluff you have to muddle through in order to get to the good part, discovering what we hold to be true and right and kind. So we take the photo, put it up and hope that the people who come into our lives have the patience, the love and the wherewithal to stick around long enough to find that teeny tiny really way far down box. As that’s what holds the essence of who we are always, not just who we chose to be frozen in a moment in time.
