Do It Without Taking a Picture · 15 Practices

Seven times, over about two weeks, you will do something ordinary and pleasant and you will not photograph it. Then, within the hour, you will write down what stayed. A meal. A sky. An evening at home. A walk. Something beautiful. A whole day out. And one that matters, which is the only one you are allowed to decline. The abstaining is not the interesting part. The writing is. Actively retrieving something from memory strengthens it far more than looking at it again does, which means ten minutes with a pen afterward does more for the evening than the photograph would have. Not photographing it clears the space. Writing it down is what puts it in. This is not an argument against your photographs. The instinct to photograph is mostly love. What you come out with is a rule you can use for the rest of your life, which is to photograph what will change rather than what is beautiful. And a question that takes one second in the moment. Am I recording something, or am I leaving? Then one last thing, and this one is permanent. You choose a single part of your life that is never photographed, never posted, never mentioned to anybody. The one part with no audience at all. Fifteen steps. Two weeks. Seven pages in your own handwriting.