This life... is pointless; as pointless as a dull knife, this life is. Why go so hard for things that won't matter in the end? Why do any of us do anything? We work to live, or live to work, tolling day after day , experiencing the nuances of people, places, and things that exist within a small frame of time.  If I leave this earth tomorrow, what have I left behind? What about me will matter enough to be remembered, creating a legacy? I... don't really matter. I'm not that important. Living to die? Where's the purpose in that? If nothing we did mattered, there would be no point in doing anything - waking up, talking to others, learning, wondering what to wear...breathing - anything.  

              Within this quaky, unnerving void of all things combined called life, there is something subtly small and profound that holds substance like none other: the value of a moment; the value of a brief period of time that will surely fade away as quickly as it came but lasts a lifetime in memory. People may forget the words you say, the clothes you were wearing, what your name was, or who you were in the first place, but people will never forget how you made them feel. 

          Memories, in a way, can be seen as snow globes, holding a culmination of events, objects, and feelings - laughter, joy, sorrow, anguish, shame - that sit at the bottom of the globe, waiting eagerly for someone to shake them around, pulling the holder back into a flurry of experiences held in that exact moment. 

            Photographers are con artists - they really are. They trap moments of time within a square, plastic film, or a virtual box on touchscreen glass. They are the fishers of memory, catching anything that snags onto the hook of their cameras - or their eyes. They deceive not only themselves but others who believe that the moment in time they have captured is still real. Pictures don't change - they never do - though the people, places, or things in them do; it's an illusion.  

           I won't dwell in the past too long - nothing's there.  That's the other way I see it: a barren wasteland full of moments trapped in time - repeating the moments - imagining a new outcome each time. "What if I said this instead of that?" "Was I right to do this?"  If you spend too much time in the past, the memories can become distorted - the water begins leaking from the snow globes, the images in the photos begin to blur. It can create a dangerous reality, or continuous loop where you replace the fragments of your past with moments that never happened - delusions of things that maybe we wished had happened.

          I don't always like those snow globes, and those photos that hang on the walls, or the virtual ones sneaking across the homepage of my phone shanking me with visions from my past. So, it's no surprise when these globes find their new resting place on the ground, in pieces, along with the photos - burned or marked out. Even then, as crazy as it may seem, it's actually a sign of relief to walk around the shards of other's broken globes, or see their marked out photos; not that their broken globes or war-torn photos bring me pleasure but rather a sense of visibility. 

   Regardless of how long we stare at those photos or old text messages, thinking of past conversations- recalling those dark and light moments -  and artifacts from our past, it won't bring them back; there are no do-overs, only try-agains.  We need not hold onto the broken glass and distorted photos from times of old, or fill their empty spaces on our walls with false memories. Instead, we are tasked with a new journey: creating more globes, and taking new photos, with new people, new things, and new places. 

"What if those new globes and photos end up on the ground or in the trash like the other ones?" To that I say this: We no longer worry about hanging onto a moment - any moment, at any point in time - or the things that may result from them, because we will be ever involved, every step of the way, in creating them.