The Power of Picture
I feel like one of the biggest aids we have in addressing the temporal disconnect is documentation.
example of "temporal disconnect": I know that tomorrow morning I have a 920 class that I need to take good notes and learn from because the subject is hard and I need good grades this semester for my gpa. I also know (from experience) that if I get less than 5 hours of sleep and go to bed drunk, I will be useless in class. But it has been a tough week and I am feeling the buzz of a friday night, the campus is alive with activity, and I can't imagine missing out! So I dive into the party environment, relish is the drinking culture, stay out until all ours of the morning, and end up sleeping straight through class.
Why? How could I simultaneously desire one thing and do exactly the opposite. I think it has something to do with time. Immediate gratification of the party scene was just more appealing and thus motivating than my thoughts about the future.
And I see this everywhere. In all people (to some extent). People want to lose weight, but offer them the right treat, and they can't resist. People want to get fit, but they just can't bring themselves to run a mile because it is so much easier to surf the web, hang with friends, even study!
Our lives are full of disconnects and contradictions. Sometimes it seems that there is very little continuity at all from one week, one day, one hour, to the next. I think pictures are powerful because they are solid. They documented a place in time. The show us the continuity that is sometimes hard to believe exists. They are a memory aid, bringing us back to a different setting and different head space.
I believe that the more in touch we are with our past, the better connected we are to the furture.
And it isn't just pictures that take us back, it is writing, and video. I think a multi-media experience is probably best because our experience is textured. Layers of images, sounds, words flowing through our heads, out our mouths, into our ears.
