Once a long time ago I went to Florida for Christmas. It was the first time that I could remember not spending it at home, but I got to go to Disney World with my mom so it seemed like a fair trade-off. Now most of the trip was pretty good and I generally look back on the whole trip fondly. There were some rough moments though dealing with extended family. When it came time for pictures to be taken I was the only one not smiling. Back then I wasn't very good at masking my emotions (come to think of it, I'm still not all that great). So the holiday pictures from that Christmas show me pouting while everyone around me is wearing their best smiles. Some might say that I ruined that precious memory, but maybe in some strange way I preserved what it was really like. If I had been more mature I could have smiled like everyone else and years later when people looked back at those pictures they would assume that we were one big happy family. That would be the illusion of tranquility though.
I've talked about nostalgia before and how it tends to alter the past, or at least our perception of the past. They say photographs never lie, but if you've looked at a magazine in the last fifty years you'd know that just about anything can be manipulated. They say you should believe none of what you hear and half of what you see. With easy to use tools like Photoshop it's hard to know if you're really looking at reality. That's really an overt alteration of the past. In a lot of cases the illusion is a lot more subtle. A photograph captures a specific moment. Look at your current day and take five random seconds from it and imagine trying to piece together what your day was really like based on those images. Now granted those moments may be unplanned and many photos are somewhat staged. You stop what you're doing and smile for the camera. Or at the very least acknowledge that it's there.
When I first left for college I stayed in touch with a few people via email, but back then most people didn't really have steady access to a computer and those who did weren't always the best about replying. So in a lot of cases we relied on the old fashion method of writing letters to each other, most of which I still have. The thing with that though is given time eventually it falls by the wayside and you just lose contact with people. These days we have this wonderful thing called Facebook. I'm able to keep in contact with people who normally wouldn't be able to given the constant changes of email addresses or phone numbers. It's this nice central hub that covers most of the things you'd do when catching up with someone. I like being able to read about someone's day or look at pictures of them and their family. There are times when I get down about how I feel like I'm behind in the way of life progression. Looking through my friends list I see so many people my age who are married and have children. Or they're off leading these fun-filled lives. I know this because they post some picture of them at a party in Chicago or them on a sailboat in the South Pacific. The thing is though that like I said before, those pictures represent individual moments and may not exactly paint the full picture. If you're on Facebook then you know that you don't share everything that happens. It's more of a highlight reel. And with any highlight reel it tends to look more exciting than what really happened. Now those pictures and status updates are windows into a much more elaborate life, one that is filled with both the good and bad that comes with it.
So we tend to remember the past in a way that may vary from what really happened. We dream about a future that may never be. Even right now seems to be shaped by what's presented to us, be it intentionally manipulated or simply altered by our perception. Does that mean everything is really an illusion? Maybe the surface is the illusion. You look at a duck on a pond and you only see what's on the surface, but underneath there is so much more going on. People are very much the same way. How far past the surface do we really get with anyone? How much of the world around us is real? Is reality just the illusion we choose to see?
