When Times Were Simple And Smiles Were Pure

I took a walk down memory lane yesterday. I opened up a box of photos that I haven’t looked at in ages. I was amazed at what I found.

The box contained a stack of old color and black and white photos, many faded by the passage of time. The one thing that wasn’t faded? The memories contained in the images. The tactile sensation of a stack of photos is so much different than a hard drive full of digital images. Sounds a little retro, doesn’t it?

It reminded me not only of the memories themselves, but in the changes we experience with the sheer passage of time. Some call it “life”.

Back in the day when I was putting a lot of slide and print film through an Olympus OM-2N, I always remarked that you would be very fortunate to have one good photo out of maybe 20 or 30 attempts. A good photo was all about being in the right place at the right time. There was a certain serendipity to catching the moment. The photo wasn’t digitally perfect. Nor is life, as we all realize (or should).

Now, you point your digital camera (or smartphone) and shoot. Chances are pretty good that you are going to get a reasonable representation of the moment at hand. These days, a great percentage of people get pretty decent (albeit mediocre) photos, ones that will suffice in a pinch. But is that all we want nowadays? Something that will just suffice so that we can share it on Facebook?

The stack of photos reminded me of how our lives have changed over the past few decades. They were memories of a time when life wasn’t so complex. Of course, that is with the beauty of hindsight. But there was something far more compelling than just the simplicity. More stunning, perhaps, were the smiles found in those same photos. There was an untarnished-by-life purity in them. There was an indescribable clarity to them. There was a joy of the moment, an appreciation for just being there, watching life happen right before us.

After holding the stack of images in my hands, and wandering through the contents, those times seemed so simple in retrospect. I smiled a weathered, 47 year-old smile and put them back in the box. After a lot of miles on life’s many roads, they were a treasure to behold. There was a beauty in the simplicity and the purity of times long past. But more importantly, it was a reminder. Maybe, even now, our lives should be that simple and pure, present in the moment, fully, completely. Our digital and analog lives would be far more vibrant with a daily mantra like that.

Photo credits: abesselink