Motion pictures
One of my favorite movies is "Saving Private Ryan." The scene where Capt. John Miller, played by Tom Hanks, is killed in action remained in my mind long after the film was over. After all this man went through to bring back from the battle lines the only Ryan son left alive, it's the private and not Capt. Miller who returns safely to his family.
The second time I watched the film, I didn't focus on that scene and I let the entire story evolve. When an elderly Mr. Ryan pays his respects at the captain's grave site, I was finally able to appreciate Miller's legacy and heroism.I have come to realize that life is not a snapshot or screenshot of temporary moments. We move along in motion pictures until the words "The End" scroll up from the bottom of our feet.I go through a box of old family photographs and you can see what I mean. There's a picture of my young mother and father, frozen in time, holding hands and smiling. I see another of a black-and-white image where my two young sisters, both deceased now, open Christmas gifts by the tree. I look on the wall downstairs and there's a picture of me at age 12 in my football uniform holding a ball above my head as if I were catching a pass.These images are mere blinks of my eyes as I ready myself for what will happen in the next hour, the next day, the next year. Time ticks forward with no sentimentality for what happened in the past. I have little choice but to move with it.Living this existence is constant movement, paused only by a camera lens or by the stop signs we build in our minds. We move with the sunrises and sunsets. We fly with the eagle above the trees into the mornings of new mornings.Dutch author Diet Eman wrote, "Life is like a film screen: Pictures come, make an impression, go, and then make a place for new pictures with new impressions which obscure the previous ones. Some of those old pictures fade, but the impressions they leave will never pass away."And so we love to pause and reminisce. In Barbra Streisand's classic song, "The Way We Were," she captures the movement of visual memory in beautifully written words of poetry."Memories light the corners of my mind … scattered pictures of the smiles we left behind, smiles we gave to one another for the way we were … can it be that it was all so simple then or has time rewritten every line? If we had the chance to do it all again, tell me, would we, could we?"An old photograph makes time stand still and freeze frames our yesterdays into experiences our minds can re-create today.As long as the pendulum on the clock swings, we think that everything swings with it. What once was real a minute ago is no longer true for us anymore. That's why we rely on art, literature and music to fix our feelings in stone and make them never blow away in the wind.Subjects in a painting bring the illusion of movement from the strokes of an artist's brush. Literature can carry us through a day or lift us through years, but there is something timeless and universal on the canvas, in written tales and in the stories revealed through the motion pictures of our lives.Author Martina Boone says it best in her novel, "Compulsion. "We've lost a lot of years, but you can't lose love. It stays locked inside you, ready for whenever you are strong enough to find it again." Each time I look at a photograph of someone dear, I feel this emotion move from his or her heart to my heart, an unexplained energy that lifts my spirit whenever I feel a need to look at the picture again.We have moments of this joy that come, but then they go. In her book, "Panic," Lauren Oliver writes, "She knew that this day, this feeling couldn't last forever. Everything passed; that was partly why it was so beautiful. Things would get difficult again. But that was OK, too. The bravery was in moving forward no matter what."The reels of the motion pictures in our lives roll on. According to writer Marty Rubin, we should live in the moment, but then leave it behind."Seize the day, then let it go."Rich Strack can be reached at