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Picture, picture everywhere

“Pictures speak a thousand words,” so goes the saying. But because of the dawn of digital cameras, pictures no longer immortalize the sense captured in this saying.

Gone are the days when we use films. Pictures then were very limited, and some even had gone to waste because a press on the shutter button was not a sure one. These were the days when a photographer could not preview images before these are developed in the dark room.

With the birth of new gadgets which include digital cameras, everyone wants to take pictures of anything. Even the most ordinary thing or moment is now being shot. No more worries about wasting rolls of film.

From a camera that uses a roll film with a capacity of 12 up to 36 shots, a digital camera requires only a memory stick which can store hundreds to thousands of shots. No wonder photos are everywhere. People can take snapshots anytime they want to. As a result, today’s world is surrounded by piles of images that grow in leaps and bounds.

Big thanks to this development in cameras. With its built-in memory card, it can store hundreds up to 10,000 photos depending on its storage capacity. One can simply download the pictures to the computer, put the card to the camera, erase all the images, and take pictures again.

Unlike the traditional cameras, once a film is consumed, there’s a need to reload another roll of film. In these new cameras, there’s no waste of money and space capacity for a shot. Just view and erase a photo which doesn’t look good and take another shot.

In social networking sites, unlimited uploading and tagging of pictures are common. Users of these new media are now bombarded by all sorts of images. This phenomenon is making pictures an ordinary sight. And the sad story is, in the case of paperbacks which contain endless texts, they just become a lullaby to a reader of this generation.

Here lies the problem. The unlimited shots offered by digital cameras drive the owner to just shoot anything without considering the idea that when this image is shared, the picture speaks a thousand words. It means that despite the overwhelming advantage of the digital camera, it is still good to go back to the basis of capturing pictures.

Healing hands

Imagine falling on your knees. Try pulling out the inertia between your feet and the ground, and deprive yourself of breath. If by falling, you get scathed, it was by means of experience and nature. Should you fall and disgrace yourself, understand that there is a choice – of waking up and enduring; or of shrinking to smithereens.

It took me 21 years to understand this fickle independence. It would always leave me wondering and curious. Yet this woman who taught me everything from the letters I would later fashion to stories to the succulent adobo had always remained the only constant element in my shifting universe.

She knows that whatever years behind her, tempered by strength and stubborn ways are wanton encounters set to reprise. And this she prepared for. That whatever misdeed or anything undone in her years, all she has to realize was the fact that she has a second chance – and even if it is not for her to decide (and not for me to tell), she understands too that a nascent life stirring in her womb is more than a part of her flesh and blood. It is a chance to set the road right in its proper route.

She was 20 when she had me. I imagine her – this small woman with curly hair, her freckled face pinkish from the chill of the highlands – and whatever potency one of that size and specification has to decide to bring this baby in this world. She and my father were in the middle of their degrees, both university students. But if letting go was an option, it was on the bottom of the list.

And it was a rite of passage so quick and conclusive. She changed her books to an apron, quit going around with friends and was raising her child whose bottom is wrapped in a lampin she would wash when soiled. It was not so much for an effort, but mind you, when she knew that the money has to start coming in, she unquestionably packed our bags, and my parents and I went to Manila where they helped my maternal grandparents sell flowers and vegetables at Dangwa.

My father continued studying then, and my mother had to balance schedule. She was pushing herself to her bounds, multitasking, years even before that term was coined. Her strength was what forced every one of us to our brinks, and whatever “spare time” she has (although she told me that if you are a mother, you can’t afford to keep some of that), she spent it all for us.

I remember rainy days when she would pull a manila paper, cut out letters from colored cartolina, paste them to the brown paper, and raise a stick to the letters for me and my siblings to learn while the smell of cooking pancakes simmer in our midst, but not breaking our concentration. It was funny though, for some years later, when at the second grade and I started reading my family’s collection of Reader’s Digest or my grandfather’s Sunday papers, I cannot be trusted to help in the chores and my mother wished she did not teach me to read so much. Or write so much, as well. For when I started publishing some of my essays, she would faithfully read them (I know she would be smiling now while she reads this) and would tell me after, “Anak, I cannot understand all of what you wrote.”

But she never knew that whatever I know or did was all attributed to the years she nurtured me and my siblings. Suffice to say that even at 21, I knew as much as her because she was not scared to tell me of life’s breaking points and rough concaves. That if wisdom was to be acquired, it may not be thoroughly by occurrence alone, but by concurrence with what others felt and shared.

Suffice to say also that her strength which springs from her children is the same energy that refracts the waves of disillusionment. And that if one day, should we also come upon choices such as those that shaped her when she was our age, whether she did well in deciding or failed to pick the right one, we would be ready to confront it.

Because if you fall on your knees, you were taught to not allow yourself to shatter, but to gather yourself, push the gravity of your weight upon the ground, and continue running. And when you look back, you will understand that the force that lifted you off from submission was not inertia, but a woman, waving at you, propelling you to move beyond, and ready with her healing hands should you stumble again at the next block.