DailyJim: Maybe the most powerful experience of my life and I stopped it to take a fucking picture

Hello everyone welcome to another daily gym today is monday april 8th 2024 and today i want to talk about how it maybe was the most powerful experience in my life and i stopped it to take a fucking picture so if you're not familiar i do swear occasionally and what i want to talk about today is how I went down with my dad and my sister to Ohio, to the Toledo Zoo, to watch the total solar eclipse. Now, I have never seen one before in my life. I've seen partial ones as a kid, I believe, a couple years ago. And people told me, okay, I was reading reading online that someone said 99% eclipse is very, very much different than a 100% eclipse. The analogy was 99% is like flying in a plane and 100% is like jumping out of a plane. I would say 100% maybe is like going to space.

So my whole life, the sun has been yellow, orange, something like this. When the eclipse happened, it went black and white. I have never seen something more powerful in my life. I was standing there behind the flamingos. I was trying to figure out, oh, what are the flamingos going to do? How are the other people going to react? The eclipse happened and I was just focused on the sun. It's like everything else disappeared. and I had tears streaming down my face.

And the eclipse was only supposed to happen for a little less than two minutes in its totality.

And probably halfway through, I bent down to pick up my fancy camera to take a fucking picture. Why?

Was it for me? Was it for other people? Was it for future me? Was it even going to be a good photo?

Why, oh why, do so many of us pause some of the best experiences of our lives to capture them in photos?

You may not be expecting this type of anger or frustration, but I am still physically moved.

And this, it's 10.30 right now. This happened at 3 o'clock. So this is seven hours later, and I am still in almost a trance. There's a basketball game, playing it as the championship for the college basketball, and I didn't want to go to the bar. I have no desire to drink alcohol right now. I am, I can't explain, it almost feels as if this may be one of the most cosmic experiences I could ever have besides going to space. And I don't even know how space would compare to this.

And I stopped it to take a fucking picture.

Why, how many other experiences in my life do i just stop because somebody else wants to experience them what is a photo from an amateur photographer with a lens that is probably broken in its auto autofocus, going to do, how is that going to compare or translate the experience to someone else?

It maybe will give 0.01% of the experience.

To be standing behind flamingos and to see them freak out and to hear everyone go silent and everything just get dark and cold all of a sudden and look up and see this glowing it's almost like a white glowing black ball in the sky.

What's a photo going to do? And am I going to look back at the photo and go, oh, that was a good time? Why can't I look back at my own memories? We're going to send the photo to somebody on social media so that they can go, oh, that was nice. Sure, other people may want to take photos, and if other people want to do that, fine. But why do I, someone who prioritizes and emphasizes the feeling, the emotional experience of life, pause something so i would say otherworldly but so earthly so so rare so this yeah it's like earthly and cosmic at the same time so, beyond words to to capture it in a two-dimensional, likely blurry photo.

How many times is somebody going to see a total solar eclipse in their lives? Well, the next one that's coming through the U.S. I think is in 20 years from now, unless you count Alaska. I think that goes a sliver of Alaska.

The next time that it comes through an area that's very close to where I grew up in Michigan, I don't know, probably longer than 20 years from now.

Life is very short. We have very powerful experiences, and often we jump out of them. We disconnect from the experience. To capture it for later or for somebody else, instead of just feeling the experience, being in it, appreciating it, capturing it in our memories, in the fiber of our being.

I feel so many mixed emotions.

Like you can hear, I feel the frustration, the deep kind of existential frustration of me jumping out of that moment. But I also feel the intense gratitude, that I went and that I saw it.

And curiosity to see how long this feeling is going to last. Not the feeling of the frustration of the photo, but the feeling of this deep connection to life, to earth, to...

Oh, it's even bringing tears to my eyes right now. know i don't i don't know how to describe it and uh i yeah yeah so, oh that's the episode for today and we'll see how much uh after effect there is tomorrow how much lingering effect there is so take care y'all.