Snapshot Risk

Well I’ve always been faithful

to my dog and my wife

and I’ve always tried

to lead a responsible kind of life……

but yesterday I stole a car, took it for a drive

I didn’t take it very far

just around the block

all right, a couple of times

How many pictures do you have to take of a person before you know them?

Let me rephrase that question. How many pictures do you have to take of a person before you THINK you know them? 1? 100? 1 million?

In all fairness, the definition of “picture” should be expanded to include all manner of electronic communications, not just images. I include e-mails, social networking site pages, blogs, Twitters, Instant Messaging, phone calls, file attachments, chats, and all the other electronic chaff generated by any human being with some form of electronic network access. Global confetti swirling around in the jet streams of the Internet and telecommunications networks.

And every single flake carrying the imprint of you, partial and incomplete.

It makes me feel disembodied. I feel no sense of real control over who and what I am. There is that old anecdote about primitive cultures believing that having one’s picture taken was tantamount to having your soul stolen. “Ha, ha,” we modern folks laugh, “How silly”, secure in the knowledge that a camera couldn’t possibly steal a soul. Well, secure when we even bother to acknowledge that a soul might exist. I cannot prove or disprove that the soul exists, but I am not prepared to disown the idea. I think there is…something…there. Otherwise, I cannot begin to explain why I sometimes feel that perhaps it has been stolen.

I don’t think I know me

as well as I thought I did

I don’t think I know me

like I thought I did

A camera by itself may not be able to steal a soul, but perhaps the sum total of electronica that we deal with on a daily basis might. It occurs to me, though, that perhaps it isn’t a question of having it stolen, so much as it is we give it away. Freely, willingly, and without much thought. That little anxiety slips under my skin like a needle, every time I hit “send”. I cannot avoid it, unless I am willing to avoid communications almost all together. This is not possible or practical. I have too much invested in it, too many things I want to see and hear.

It bothers me that we act like cameras, every day, but what is the alternative? Filtering information from the immense streams of data we process minute by minute, hour by hour, is like trying to sip water from a fire hose. To deal with the stream, in an attempt to make sense of this flood, we slice it. We freeze it. We cherry pick a singular moment, a wafer thin slice of infinity and pretend that we have all we need to know about anyone.

…if I say all my prayers

I’ll go to heaven

at least I pray that I will

but yesterday in my neighbor’s yard

I stole my neighbor’s bike

I don't intend to give that Harley back

it occurs to me

that ain’t very Christian like

As long as we confine our conclusions to the particular slice of information we have at that particular time this approach may work. It is so limiting, though, because of the narrowness of the focus. Dipping our hands in a river to study the palmful of water does not truly qualify us to speak of the river as a whole.

I wonder what river I am sometimes, when the Outside samples me at random and without my knowledge. Who is dipping their hands in the river, and when? What water are they seeing, smelling, tasting? The Nile is a very different entity from the dry season to the floods. If someone samples when running clear they will think very differently than someone who samples a mouthful of silty water. They may not want to come back. Conclusions will be drawn, some unfavorable, some not. But the information used to generate those conclusions is all me.

…and my family takes picnics

to the park on warm weather holidays

and we ask all our neighbors

and they invite all their friends in kind

and they all bring side dishes

and we form one big holiday buffet line…

Electronic media may be a wonderful facilitator, but it is also a powerful distorter. We tend to forget that what we see or read at any given moment is not the whole story of the person or thing represented. Life as reality TV: be careful what you say or do, because you don’t get to be the editor of it all, unless you control the media itself. Controlling all media is impossible.

So who do I live my life for? Is it for myself, or the invisible universe? I want to live it for myself, whatever that takes. Ultimately, I cannot control what the world will think of me, no matter what I say and do. That includes good and bad, polite and rude, courageous or cowardly. And I know I cannot be all good all the time, just as I would never be bad all the time. But I do realize I that I will never be able to dictate what people see at any given moment, because I do not control their time and how they choose to spend it. I am also painfully self-conscious much of the time. So you can see this creates a powerful dilemma for me. How do I live a fully engaged life as me without drowning in a sea of anxiety created by the uncontrollable snap judgments of others?

…but yesterday, Independence Day

at eighty-five miles an hour

I plowed that Harley through the buffet line

it occurs to me…

The solution I believe to be simple like making steamed rice or making bread. Don’t laugh, it’s true. I don’t mean instant rice or prepackaged bread dough. I mean plain rice out of bag, no treatments. I mean flour, salt, yeast and water. Do you remember the first time you tried to make rice, or a loaf of bread? I do. It was…edible, sort of. But the end result defied the expectations engendered by the seeming simplicity of it all. How could something so simple be so hard to do?

It takes patience, care and attention to detail. With so few ingredients, they have to be good quality and you have to treat them right. So I reckoned that for my life I would stick to good ingredients, not too many and take good care of them. I finally realized that I can say and write and post what I want. To remove the worry, all that is required is honesty, sincerity and not saying things that I could possibly regret later, or that I would want to take back. Don’t commit it to speech or paper or image unless you really mean it, no matter what. Be true.

I don’t think I know me

as well as I thought I did

I don’t think I know me

like I thought I did

We all take snapshots. But snapshots only offer information about a particular set of circumstances, a singular look at someone that doesn’t offer enough data about the whole. In my case, I am striving to put up snapshots that really are me. A tall order when “I’m a million different people from one day to the next” as Verve says. But I can’t worry about that anymore. Try and take a lot of snapshots. After all, a single tile does not a mosaic make.

I am a mosaic. Make a picture out of me.

(Italicized paragraphs are lyrics from the song “I Don’t Think I Know Me” by Eddie From Ohio, on the album Big Noise)

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THE CHEST THUMPING CONTINUES: Please don't forget the HeBlogs/SheBlogs contest forget sponsored by Petra over at The Wise (*Young*) Mommy. Today's entries are from Captain Dumbass at Us and Them and Matt from DCUrbanDad, two nice guys who are quite funny and thoughtful and will lose, er, do their best. The posts go up at 8:00. Check them out, it will get your day off to a roaring start!