By Alexa Marquis, Editor-In-Chief
There are lots of events from my life that I find myself thinking about very vividly with no real prompt. My memory isn’t always the best, but there are a big handful of things where if I close my eyes, I am practically back there again. The memory is razor sharp. It’s a clarity that I don’t seem to have a lot of these days.
I wondered if it’s because I’m not as present now that I’m distracted by the inner workings of my phone. Do I really remember who was at some party apart from the people I spoke to? When did I last look at a beautiful view without taking a picture saying “wow!” through a screen? What did the person look like who was in front of me in line at the grocery store? I spend so much time buried in my phone that I wonder if I’m cutting off my peripherals in a way I never used to.
When I was in kindergarten, my mom and my friend’s mom took my friend and me to see Kelly Clarkson in concert. It was at the Nissan Pavilion (now known as Jiffy Lube Live), and we had lawn seats. I was six and my friend was eight and we could barely see over the sea of bodies until someone from Kelly’s team came over and gave us free tickets for the general admission pit right by the stage.
Thanks to that random man, my six-year-old self was able to experience a feeling that would become more addictive than anything else she would come across in her life. The stage lights were brighter, and the lyrics to songs that I used to play on repeat for months came to life right in front of me. My six-year-old self found this moment almost indescribable and it’s something that has stuck with me ever since. I was overwhelmed by happiness and awe. Everything around me started to blur. Being lost in the moment is a real thing, and this was one of those moments (even little six year olds can experience those moments). I remember looking over to my friend and seeing that she was also having the time of her life, and somehow seeing that made my happiness greaten even more.
When I was at that concert I didn’t have a cell phone on me, so I never once thought, “I need to take a photo/video of this, where’s my phone?” I wonder now how much we stop a real life experience to document it, before really looking at it with our eyes first. It’s almost automatic now, we see something cool and then we think, “wait there, I just need to snap it quickly.” Does it affect how we remember things? Do photos skew our memories? If I was panicking about getting a good photo of Kelly Clarkson right in front of me, would it have been as magical?
With apps like Timehop telling us what to remember, I can’t help but think that some of the best things in my life weren’t captured, and if they were, I certainly didn’t get the best bits because the times I’d been truly lost in the moment, would’ve been spent soaking it in and not scrabbling around in my bag to find my phone. I am totally guilty of trying to get everything on camera, but sometimes you get that feeling that it’s just kind of…disrespectful to not just soak it up.
No app or social media site would be able to “remind” me of that concert which I can remember so well. There was something about the way I was able to forget about my surroundings, where I saw my one of my best friends happier than ever before, where I saw the artist just as happy as her fans, and where I connected with total strangers, that changed something about me. In some sense, those moments made me feel like I was a part of something and would never be alone. I may not love Kelly Clarkson anymore as much as I did when I was younger, but the memory of that concert put me in a new mindset and I’ve never needed photos or videos to remind me of that.