Living Life in Phases

As I write this, I’m in the late stages of planning a trip with five other photographers. If you read this the day it’s published, I’ll be in France(!) and I am in full on packing/panicking mode. 

They say that you experience every vacation three times: the vacation you experience as you plan, the one you have while you’re actually traveling, and the one you remember after you get back. 

The idea is that you experience the trip three times as deeply if you enjoy all three phases. And of course, photography during phase two is meant to help you with the remembering in phase three. 

This same idea can be applied to so many things in life. Big milestone moments, holidays. Even life as a whole, on a rolling basis. 

It can be overwhelming to consider that last bit. To think of living each little day of life in three phases. But that’s what we do, right? We plan what we think the day/week will look like; we live it, with its ups and downs and routines and surprises; and we process it after it’s over, in one way or another. “Whew, what a week.” “OMG this day.” 

How often do we stop and say “wow, what a great day” when it’s just a regular Monday? How many times have you paused, really drinking in life at that moment, when it’s just the kids talking about farts at the dinner table? 

When you’re in the haze of 90-minute bedtime routines and teaching children how to wash themselves and use the bathroom, when you’ve told them to brush their teeth for the fourteenth time in five minutes and reminded them again that it’s time to put on their shoes, it can feel like you’ll always be doing that thing. But there are so many things that we don’t do anymore. So many routines that are gone, like long trips we won’t take again. 

I wouldn’t say that I miss them. (My 6 year old asked recently if she’s too big to fit into diapers now and I had a flashback and a flood of gratitude to be done with diapers.) I don’t miss a lot of things that were hard when they were happening. It is fun to look back at photos from those days, though. To remember the room we set aside only for diaper changing. Reminisce about the foods our kids used to never/always eat, and how they would tear all of the plastic containers out of the cabinets while we attempted to make dinner around them. 

Regular life deserves to be lived like a cherished vacation. Hoped for, lived with deep present breaths, preserved for future remembering with the obligatory rose colored glasses. Maybe not every minute of every day. But at some point of every day, give yourself a chance to live your life three ways. See if it feels deeper, richer, more meaningful. 

If you want help with the documenting of the present, so that you can also be in the photos for the future, I’m here for that. In either an hour-long casual family session, or a 30-minute Snapshot session where you invite me over for a specific activity that you’d like to remember. A dinner full of fart talk; part of your bedtime routine; a walk with the family dog in which you tell the kids seventeen times to put on their shoes before we walk out the door. 

Spring is around the corner and is a perfect time for photos. Contact me and tell me what you’d like to remember in this season.