A friend and I were reminiscing about home movies and how our parents seemed to drag out the video camera for all the family occasions. It resulted in reels and reels of film — capturing the unedited stuff-of-life moments that can now be re-lived through digitization.
How ironic that today, when our video cameras are built into the device we have with us at all times, I have far fewer videos than of my childhood when it involved lugging a bulky camera, dropping off film to process, paying for it, and requiring a projector and screen to watch them. On my phone with 30,000+ photos, I have less than 200 videos.
It reminded me of a thought by Sheryl Sandberg in her book Option B. She wrote about the unexpected loss of her husband and how she wished she had taken more videos with him — to capture his voice, his essence, and how he interacted with others. This has caused me to be more intentional about hitting that “video” button — not just for vacations or holidays, but to preserve the everyday moments I will miss when they no longer occur.
Consider the difference between the picture of my Emma below and the video of her.
A picture is worth a thousand words, but a moving picture with sound — well, that must be worth thousands more.
