Change is the process by which the future invades our lives.

– Alvin Toffler

I so love still photography with its power to freeze moments in time.

Ann and I joined with dear friends of ours this past August as their twin sons celebrated their Bar Mitzvahs. It was a beautiful and moving affirmation of their coming of age in their faith tradition.

During the reception, the family shared a wonderful slide show that captured many of the significant – and ordinary – events that had unfolded in the lives of their boys. There they were – infants, toddlers, preschoolers and young adults – their faces looking out from the past.  Frozen in time.

This past weekend, we enjoyed a wonderful dinner with another couple.  As we sat around the table telling stories and reminiscing, one of our friends brought out a thirty year old Polaroid snapshot that had been taken of her standing in the very kitchen she had prepared our meal in. Her youthful face glowing in the camera’s eye. A moment of innocence and beauty held dear.

Photographs capture our most precious moments.  And our silliest, and our happiest,  and our saddest and our most mundane.  They allow us to hold those moments in our minds and hearts. To laugh in the face of time.

But they haunt us too.  They haunt us with the reality of how fleeting it all is. With age.  With loss.  With the reality of impermanence.

Impermanence is a fundamental principal of Buddhist philosophy. But Buddhism has no particular corner on it.

Joan Dideon recounts the year following her husband’s sudden death in her stark yet tender book The Year of Magical Thinking.  On the very first page she says,  “Life changes in an instant. An ordinary instant.”

So true.

This past Saturday, my three year old niece was diagnosed with leukemia.  Life so fragile. Life changed in an ordinary instant.

And beyond the walls of the hospital, life goes on.  Shopping.  Paying bills.  Going to work. Going to school. By necessity life goes on.

In the face of inevitable change, we need continuity.  We seek stability.  We crave the illusion of that which is permanent.

Virgina Woolf in her 1932 New Year’s Eve journal entry writes,

“If one does not lie back and sum up and say to the moment, stay you are so fair, what will be one’s gain, dying? No, stay this moment.  No one ever says that enough.”

Photographer Sam Abell published a beautiful collection of his landscape photographs using, as his title, Woolf’s words:  “Stay This Moment.”

Roscoe Pound says of my profession:  “The law must be stable but it must not stand still.”

That is our bind, isn’t it?  The absolute need for stability.  And the absolute truth of change.

Life must be stable.  But it doesn’t stand still.

As the days of December dwindle to a new year, stay the moment.