The moments we remember most aren’t always the ones we knew were important at the time.
It was just another day.
We had taken our time getting to our usual coffee shop, and our favourite table was vacant, waiting for us. We sat by the window, drinking our coffee and watching the world pass by.
Sometimes we talked about our plans for the rest of the day. Other times, our next holiday. And sometimes we simply sat there, enjoying being out in the world and quietly observing it.
This time was no different.
People passed by with the usual purpose in their faces. Delivery drivers unloaded their vans and continued on their way. Nothing happened that gave us any reason to remember that particular morning.
When we finished our coffees, we left and got on with the rest of the day, just as we had so many times before.
And yet one day, something that feels completely ordinary now may become something we would give almost anything to experience once more.
There is no warning.
No voice says:
Pay attention. You’re going to miss this.
We Expect Memories to Come From Important Days
For much of my life, I’ve assumed the moments I would remember would be the important ones.
Getting married.
Milestone birthdays. Family celebrations. Births, christenings, marriages and deaths.
Starting my first job. Getting my first promotion. Paying off our home loan and becoming debt-free. Retirement.
And, of course, my first trip to New York in my twenties.
These were the occasions when I deliberately took photographs and thought, I want to remember this.
But I’ve discovered that memory has its own priorities.
Decades later, what returns unexpectedly is often something much smaller.
The sound of someone singing in the kitchen while they prepared a meal.
The way afternoon light fell across a particular room and how it felt to be there.
The view from the passenger seat on a road travelled hundreds of times.
None of these moments would have seemed worthy of remembering when they happened. There was no reason to think they would matter.
But somehow they did.
I’ve come to realise that milestones tell me what happened.
Ordinary memories often tell me what life felt like.
The Ordinary Becomes Precious When It Stops Being Ordinary
So much of life is habitual.
Even when something changes, it doesn’t take me long to establish a new routine, and before long that feels normal too.
Perhaps that’s one of the purposes of routine. It allows us to get on with living without having to think about every small thing we do.
But it also makes things invisible.
The same cup of coffee from the same coffee shop, where they see me walking in and begin making it before I’ve even ordered.
The same drive to work each morning. The same streets. Looking for a parking space in roughly the same place and usually finding one.
Then something changes.
My workplace moves to another suburb. Suddenly I’m driving a different route and parking somewhere else. I buy my coffee from a shop where nobody knows me or what I’m going to order.
What surprises me isn’t simply the inconvenience of having to change.
It’s what I begin to miss.
The old workmates. The people at the coffee shop. Their friendliness. The familiar smile when I walked through the door.
What I miss isn’t necessarily anything extraordinary that someone did.
Sometimes I simply miss the certainty that they would be there tomorrow, doing nothing particularly remarkable.
We Rarely Know When Something Happens for the Last Time
Looking back, I can identify many firsts.
My first date. My first day at work. My first home. My first overseas trip.
Firsts tend to announce themselves. For me, they’ve usually arrived with some combination of anxiety and excitement. I knew something new was beginning.
Lasts are different.
Often, I don’t know something is a last when it happens.
Whenever my wife, Marie, and I visited Point Danger, we would call into a particular restaurant and art shop. It became part of going there. We didn’t think much about it because we assumed it would be there the next time.
Recently, we returned.
The restaurant and art shop were gone. In their place was a construction site for a high-rise.
At some point, we had visited those places for the last time.
We just didn’t know it.
There have also been occasions when I’ve had an ordinary conversation with someone, only to hear a few months later that they had died.
The conversation hadn’t felt significant at the time. Why would it?
Nobody announces:
This will be the last time.
A moment simply becomes a last retrospectively.
I couldn’t live normally if I treated every ordinary moment as though it might never happen again. I’m not sure I’d want to.
Perhaps the best I can do is become a little better at noticing while it is still here.
Maybe Paying Attention Is Enough
It’s surprisingly easy to move through familiar surroundings without really seeing them.
I can walk around my home or through places I visit regularly as though I’m wearing blinkers.
I don’t notice the mark on the wall that needs cleaning.
I don’t notice that the neighbour three doors up has moved and someone else lives there now.
Familiarity makes remarkably effective camouflage.
But I don’t think the answer is to transform ordinary life into an endless exercise in gratitude. I don’t need to turn every conversation into an experience or photograph every meal just in case it is the last.
That would turn paying attention into another obligation.
Perhaps what I need are simply occasional moments of recognition.
I often walk onto our deck and look around. Until recently, I could go back inside moments later and struggle to remember what I’d actually seen.
Now I’m trying to pause occasionally and really look.
A kookaburra sitting in the tree. I point it out to Marie.
The grass in the park has just been mown.
Nothing remarkable.
And that’s the point.
I’m not trying to make the ordinary extraordinary.
I’m trying to notice the ordinary while it is still ordinary.
Sometimes the Camera Makes Me Notice
Photography has occasionally given me something I didn’t realise I needed.
It has made me stop long enough to notice an ordinary moment while it was still ordinary.
A camera doesn’t preserve life. Nor does making a photograph guarantee that I’ll remember what something felt like.
But photography does one thing particularly well.
It asks me to pay attention.
A couple of weeks ago, Marie and I visited Brunswick Heads on a day trip. Looking through the photographs afterwards, I realised that most of them weren’t of the obvious attractions.
They were photographs of patterns in the sand and the way shallow creek water changed with the light and shadows.
We did walk towards the beach and were fortunate enough to see a whale breach. I managed to photograph it. We waited, hoping it might happen again, but it was a one-off.
Once, I would have headed straight for the beach in search of the whales. I doubt I would even have noticed the patterns in the sand. And if somebody had pointed them out, I probably wouldn’t have been interested.
Photographing the whale was exciting.
But strangely, the photographs I find myself enjoying more are those quieter ones of sand, shallow water, light and shadow.
Something in the way I see has changed.
I’m becoming less interested in using photography simply to record what happened and more interested in what it makes me notice.
The Photographs We Didn’t Know Would Matter
When I make a photograph, I naturally judge it by what it is at that moment.
Does the composition work?
Is the light good?
Is the subject clear?
Did I get the technical things right?
But I’ve come to realise that every photograph eventually acquires another ingredient, one I can’t control.
Time.
I remember making a photograph of the Tiber River in Rome. Years later, while looking at it again, I discovered a runner on the riverbank whom I hadn’t noticed when I took the photograph.
Nothing in the image had changed.
I had.
Then there is a photograph of Marie standing in front of that art shop at Point Danger.
At the time, it was simply a photograph of Marie outside a place we enjoyed visiting.
Now the shop is gone; the photograph carries something else. It brings back the pleasure of wandering through the art and craft inside. It reminds me of a place that, without our knowing it, we were visiting for the last time.
The photograph hasn’t improved technically.
Its meaning has changed.
Perhaps that’s one of the strange things about photographs. We make them in the present, but we don’t get to decide what they will mean to us in the future.
Sometimes the most valuable thing in an old photograph is the thing we barely noticed when we took it.
Today Will Become Somewhere We Used to Live
Something in your life today will probably be something you miss one day.
You probably don’t know what it is.
Neither do I.
And perhaps that’s as it should be.
We can’t spend our lives rehearsing the disappearance of everything we love.
But occasionally, we can stop.
Look around.
Listen.
Notice who is there.
Not because the moment is extraordinary.
Because it isn’t.
Tomorrow we may return to the same coffee shop. Perhaps our favourite table will be vacant again. We’ll order the same coffees, sit by the same window and watch the same world go by.
Nothing important may happen.
But I’m beginning to understand that this doesn’t mean nothing worth remembering is happening.
Perhaps some of the memories we’ll treasure most are being made today, on a day we haven’t thought important enough to remember.
Originally published in Full Frame, The Art of Photography