The Saint
A Kodak moment
Hannah Brownlow tells us to capture them
It was when I was singing along to Stand and Deliver, by Adam and the Ants one morning, with the sun pouring through the balcony doors and shining on Veronas terracotta roofs, that I realised I was having a strange out-of-body experience. I had never imagined that, in my life, that particular scenario would ever take place.
I stopped to think a while, and several more of these strange experiences surfaced. Like watching X:Men Origins: Wolverine in an open air cinema next to a beautiful hilltop castle (or rather, buying tickets so that we could creep round the grounds to take pictures of the sunset). A fellow camp tutor put one of her own such experiences to me: I was eating all this amazing Italian food with a family that I not only didnt know, but didnt even understand... Oh yeah, and watching Michael Jacksons funeral. In Italian. It may have ended there for Michelle, but for me the madness continues. My housemate asked me what a mushroom was, and what she should do with it; I sought sanity in the post office, only for the cashier to ask me to verify Scotlands exact location.
I relish these moments. They are the times that you can put your life on pause for a second and take a photo. Put them all in an album, come back in another twenty years and you have the story of your life in all its unpredictable glory.
Ok, so its nice to look back over the high school discos, your best friends 21st, the graduation ball, the family holiday to Greece. But they are all pretty standard. If, at the age of 16, someone presented you with a photographic representation of your life, you would probably expect all those things to be there. What you wouldnt expect, and would arguably look forward to more, are the unusual, unpredictable, out-of-body experiences. Either magically documented because someone happened to have a camera, or just forever imprinted in your memory.
We live a life of restrictions: timetables, schedules, diaries, agendas, career plans and life plans. We try to organise ourselves implicitly. The unpredictable is not accepted in todays society. But it is the unpredictable that allows us to be ourselves. We cannot plan for the unpredictable, therefore we are forced to act as ourselves, and normally that is when were seen at our best. So readers, I urge you! Seek the unpredictable, embrace the abnormal, and when taking an exam in comparative literature, make sure you know what Tuberculosis is Ive heard it helps.
More from Viewpoint
