MySpace

I was friends with Tom. Everyone with a MySpace page was friends with Tom. I demoted Tom to carefully select my Top 8 friends to display on the front page. There was friendship politics involved in jockeying for Top 8 status.

The website started pretty basic, but became really overwhelming. Originally, we could customize a few features. Pretty soon, everyone had custom cursors and background music. My friends and I posted and shared pictures. We wrote messages, sent video clips, and links to websites we’d discovered. There weren’t any politics, or bots, or ads.

It was a relatively wholesome experience. Those years, those photos, and that site felt as if they would last forever. We all moved on, but it was still there as a signpost of the years we passed through. Until it wasn’t. In an effort to update their servers, so much data was wiped out.

I went to look for my old page, and it was gone. A catalog of interactions, just deleted. What I thought would exist forever did not even survive my lifetime. Even if I had the pictures, looking at them might jog some memories, but it wouldn’t bring back that time.

Despite my efforts to store the past, “server failures” happen. No matter how hard I try to assert my will over the future, I can only shape it somewhat. I am generally fond of those years, but I don’t remember every moment.

While there are times I want to hold on to everything, I can’t. Even when I reflect on those experiences, I am not reliving them. I am using right now to remember them.

I say I practice being in the moment.

I am not sure I have to practice. I am always in the moment. I may be using this moment to recall the past or to plan the future. However, I am always right here, right now. I get to choose where I invest my thoughts.

Will I use this moment to dwell on the past? Will I spend now trying to predict a future that will probably never occur? Can I use this space, my space, right now on right now?

Be curious, be kind, be whole, do good things.