A team of evolutionary biologists from Oxford University recently analyzed the evolving brain size of some 500 mammalian species. They found the greatest increases in animals living in social groups. Monkeys, horses, dolphins and dogs. Not so much our solitary and independent-minded kitties.
But now on to the human mammal. Especially around the Christmas season. The season for not only taking family pictures, but taking out old picture albums. A gentle, time-lavished habit.
As our eyes travel the pages and the faces, we are meeting lives we often forget to remember. Not only the lives of long ago loved ones, but also the younger lives of those who are still with us. Now this looking warrants a second look...!
When we gaze into the eyes of those who are now gone, what do we see? We see perhaps old memories, old loves, old angers, and even old identities we can no longer name. As these long ago eyes look back at us from these aging photos, how does it make you feel? Good? Bad? Indifferent? Whatever the feeling, the fact remains. These people were once a part of your life (or at least you lineage) so it would be good to treat them with the respect they have earned in your life.
As for the young faces in these albums who are now older faces -- parents, children, siblings, friends -- there is something special going on here. They are looking back at you as you are, while you are looking back at them as they were. The moment can stir a great many emotions, for it is one more way of understanding the inexorable, un-retreatable march of time.
Families. Photos. Memories. Their momentary intersections this time of year can release even more energy than the world's enormous Hadron Collider. Yes, atomic and sub-atomic energy pools are incomprehensibly vast. But by comparison to the energy pool of family remembrances...hardly in the same league.
Merry memories....
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I'd like to think WE are smarter...but then I wonder.
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