Book of Faces

The other day I was cleaning off my bookcase when I noticed this weird book sitting on the top shelf.  I reached up to grab this slender, thin but very wide book off the shelf.   As I grabbed it, it slipped from my fingers and fell to the ground.  When it hit the ground it opened and there were all these faces looking back it.  I saw myself sitting behind a birthday cake at my sixth birthday party.  My brother and I were staring back at me dressed as crayons for Halloween.  As I flipped the pages in this book there were all different kinds of faces staring back at me.   They were my faces at different periods of my life.

This book of faces I was looking at was a picture album.  Do you have one of those?  Most people don’t seem to have picture albums anymore.  We all rely on a different book of faces for our pictures.  We rely on facebook.  That is the way we stay in touch with everyone.  We chat, we like each other’s statuses, we comment on pictures and videos, we do all of our socializing with each other through this online social network.  It’s great, don’t get me wrong, but do you want all of your memories to be on a computer?  Does everything have to involve technology? 

I love technology.  I love to make movies and use facebook, and I don’t know how I would do my job without email, but as I stood there holding the memories of my life in my hands I realized that life is not a computer program.  What happens if facebook or twitter, or myspace disappears?  If something happens to the server then all of your memories and pictures could be gone for good.  Here in front of me was my childhood and I am always able to reach up and look at it any time I want to. It is so funny to look back and relive your past through the things you wore and the haircuts you had.

Our world is made up of the faces that surround us.  They are the people we love and have deep impacts on our lives.  We take pictures everyday now with our phones or digital cameras, but what do we do with those memories.  Do we put them on facebook or do we put them into a book of faces.  My answer is we do both.

It is fun to have people comment on our pictures and laugh with us, but it is so important that we have something to remember all those times together.  So tomorrow, go and get a photo album, print some of those pictures you love from facebook.  Take them and place them where you can relive those moments in time anytime you want to.  Place them in a book of faces.