On Catching Fireflies and Social Media

Or the grief that comes from time passing too quickly.

This weekend, I went to visit my Mom in my hometown, and on the way down in the car, I deleted my Facebook and Instagram apps. I have been struggling in the past few weeks with how and how much I should use social media. These apps create a compulsion within me to share and record even the most mundane moments of my life. This desire to share on social media often serves as a distraction. I wanted my weekend with my Mom to be as free of distractions as possible, but, if I’m being honest, I also wanted to record it on Instagram. It is a tension that I struggle with on most days. 

I’ve been reading many thoughtful and inspiring pieces on giving up social media including this essay  “Leaving Instagram: One Year Later” by

Tsh Oxenreider

and “Why I Deleted Social Media” and “You Cannot Capture It” by

Katie Marquette

After a long day of packing and travel, I was curled up on the couch reading some similar pieces on Substack to get a few minutes of rest and relaxation before it was time for bed. After only a few minutes on the couch, I heard my Mom and my youngest son outside trying to catch fireflies. I knew it was a moment that I didn’t want to miss. I drug myself off the couch and decided to leave my phone behind per the influence of my recent reading. As I watched my son run around the yard I had this overpowering urge run and get my phone, but then I remembered the words of

Katie Marquette

from her essay “You Cannot Capture It”: 

“We cannot stop time or slow it down, though I think our obsessive picture taking and documenting gives us the illusion we can. We cannot save a precious moment - and in fact, we may lose the moment altogether in our attempt to freeze it in its precise detail.

You cannot capture it.

But maybe that is the gift of human mortality. It is all fading. Nothing lasts. There is a profound beauty in giving up that grasp on the world, that attempt to hold it in our hands, in a pixelated, perfectly wrought image. let it go.

Remember, and maybe sometimes forget, and just live.

 I realized with full-force that no matter what I did, I would not be able to capture that moment with a picture or a story on Instagram. The red and orange of the sky simply would not translate into pixels. My hesitancy to get on the grass in my socks (for fear they would get wet or dirty) simply could not be conveyed in a photograph. My sons frustration that the fireflies were so tricky to catch just couldn’t be adequately preserved in time. But why not try? Why not at least make an attempt to preserve these memories, I asked myself. The answer came clearly (perhaps from all the thoughtful reading I have done recently): My attempts to try to capture these moments in time effectively prevent me from living in the moment myself. My attempt to get a picture shifts my focus away from the moment and onto the preservation of it. I’m learning that my ability to live in the moment is much more important than trying to capture it in a picture. So, I have no pictures of my son trying to catch fireflies on this late Friday night at the end of June. His running around the yard, the sound of my Mom laughing, and the red and glow of the sunset exist only in my memory, and now, I suppose, in this writing. 

As this moment in my life ended, I felt a bit sad about not having anything of it to take with me into the future. I realized, maybe for the first time, that maybe my frantic attempts to capture and preserve moments in pictures is a way of dealing with a certain kind of grief. A grief that comes when I feel that my life is passing me by too quickly, that my boys are growing up too fast, that I am missing moments, and that time feels like sand running through my fingers. I think sometimes this grief or sadness produces this urgency in me to hold on to these moments in the way I know how—with a picture— with physical evidence that it happened.

I’m learning, though, that maybe the better place to preserve our moments is not in the physical, but in the spiritual. My memory of this evening with my son now lives mainly in my mind, and in my senses. I can’t show you a picture of it, but I can feel the recollection of it in my body. Maybe that kind of memory is more true than any that our technology can produce. Maybe memories were meant to be carried within us with no physical reminder necessary. 

While we were out catching fireflies, my son was frustrated that he couldn’t catch a firefly despite his best attempts. Even the ones he did catch flew away before he actually got them in the jar. I tried to help, but even I found them hard to catch. It was getting too dark to see them and we just weren’t fast enough to catch them. We finally caught one, and put in the mason jar my Mom had brought out for the purpose. My son carefully poked a hole in the lid, so that the firefly wouldn’t die. We left the jar and the firefly on the porch, but in the morning the tiny insect was gone. It had escaped through its air hole. The irony was not lost on me that catching this elusive firefly, that could maybe be captured for a moment, is exactly what it is like for us to try to capture and hold on tight to our most sacred memories. A mason jar and the camera on our phones aren’t enough to contain them. The beauty of these moments can be remembered but it can’t truly be captured in the way that I want to capture it. Unless our memories live somewhere deep within us, maybe they live nowhere at all. And more than that, maybe our desperate attempts to record/document them is keeping us from truly living them. As Mary Oliver reminds me, I only have this one precious life to live. I don’t want to spend so much time trying to capture it that I forget to live within it. 

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PS: I’m heading out for vacation in a few days, so it may be a couple of weeks before I share anything. Thank you for reading! :)