A moment behind the scenes here.

Every post I write has a photo. And they come from my photos, stored in iCloud. (Except the picture in this post. It’s from Megin.)

So every post, I spend some time finding the right (or at least A) photo from six years of photos. As I was looking for a photo for Rich’s post yesterday, I once again scrolled through those pictures. They include pictures of people no longer with us, relationships that have changed, events that were hard in the moment or in review. They include lots of photos of the hospital (every Sunday for more than four years, for example), of our vacations at Whitefish Point, of weddings and funerals.

Two or three times a week, I scroll through part of that stream of photos and refeel those gains and losses. And because I’m human, I tend to feel the stab of the losses more than the smiles.

I could spend a lot of energy to catalog the photos. I could spend a little energy to extract the hard photos and save them to my computer where I can choose to look at them rather than stumble as I scroll past them.

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I’ve written before about Paul’s personal commitment to forget what was past and to push forward. And I understand that we cannot, and perhaps should not, forget everything. But I’m pretty sure that we can take some simple steps to stop tripping over the things that could be removed from the path or the stream.

Moving pictures to a file. Changing a driving route. Giving up affirmation for lent. Deciding what finished means for projects and assignments and books and relationships.

We can do this. Maybe even this weekend.

Peace.