The eye of the beholder

Wednesday 18th September 2019. 

It’s been a minute since I sat in front of my laptop and let my hands type what my mind can think of. 

Sometimes I find it so crazy how much a single year can change a person. 

This time last year I was living in a beautiful country, working hard Monday to Friday, spending my days off at the beach, buying clothes with dollar$ and eating açai bowls for breakfast everyday. 

The biggest thing I learnt whilst living in another country and having the opportunity to travel it, was to live in the moment. 

In 2014 during a night out in Belfast, my phone got stolen from my handbag whilst sitting in a nightclub. I remember being completely devastated I lost all the photographs I had built up over the years of the crazy memories I created in my life. Nothing else annoyed me, not even the fact my bag was physically unzipped and my phone taken out by a stranger but loosing my photos made me shed a tear or two. 

Five years on, technology has completely evolved and you can save every photo instantly to the cyber world and have access to it whenever, wherever, even if your phone gets lost or stolen. 

I started to travel down the East Coast of Australia taking a lot of photos and videos of the incredible things my eyes seen, knowing that no camera would ever pick up just how beautiful some things truly were. As I was consistently travelling, I never lived with a pair of shoes on my feet, let alone live or be near anywhere that had WiFi to back up my photos and videos. I noticed my battery started to play up and my phone would switch on and off. The motherboard also started to breakdown and I knew this because it had the multi-coloured bars on the screen. I still continued to attempt any photos and videos possible during travelling knowing that when I got to Brisbane, I would have WiFi and the ability to get my phone fixed as I had a house set up there to live in. 

Needless to say, the day I arrived in Brisbane, my phone completely broke. It wouldn’t charge or turn on. I was in a panic and went to an Apple store to see what could be done as I still hadn’t had the chance to save a single photograph of my travels from the day I left New South Wales. 

I knew what the outcome would be but hearing “the phone isn’t fixable” set me back around 2000 photos and shattered my heart. Knowing that no one would be able to see what I did, that I couldn’t show my photos to any family or friends and say “I was there, I seen this”. 

See, what I took away from this is that it’s about the moment you experience. It’s not about trying to capture it through a lens or fathom a description of it, it’s about being in that moment and taking it in. 

I’ve sat at the top of mountains, swam in the bluest lakes, bathed under waterfalls, driven on beaches and lay on the whitest sands you could ever imagine. 

I lay under the sky, staring at the milky way on a dried out lake 2 hours inland of Queensland, whilst my tent was set up behind me ready to sleep in. 

I have done what people can only dream of and I have lived in those moments. I have sat and took in those moments whilst they have happened. I’ve learnt that not every moment in your life needs to be photographed or posted about and sometimes the real memory is through your own eyes, your own thoughts during that exact moment in time. 

I walked out of the Apple store trying to process and hold together how sad I was that I had lost all those pictures and videos I thought were so precious but what I quickly came to realise over the coming days was that the most precious thing of all, is actually how present and self aware you can become during moments in time. How you create and remember what you saw, how it made you feel, what the air smelt like, what the colour of the sky was, was the ground beneath your feet soft, every single detail in precious. 

How do you remember a memory?