Someone recently asked me if I had more photographs of myself.
Sitting in the garden with a cup of tea.
Walking along the beach.
Reading in the sunshine.
Just… living everyday life.
The truth is, I don’t.
Not because I don’t do those things.
I do them all the time.
The photographs simply don’t exist.
And that made me wonder…
When did we start believing that a moment becomes more real because somebody else has seen it?
There seems to be an expectation now that if we’re happy, peaceful or content, we should somehow document it.
Take the photograph.
Post it.
Share it.
Almost as though the moment only counts once other people have witnessed it.
But I don’t think that’s true.
Some of my happiest moments have never been photographed.
I sit in my garden with a cup of tea.
I curl up on the sofa with a bag of Jelly Tots and a good television programme.
I walk along the beach on my own.
I paddle until the water reaches my ankles and wait for that lovely moment when the wave slips away again and the sand shifts beneath my feet.
Every single time it makes me smile.
Sometimes I pick up a pebble and bring it home.
I call them my memory pebbles.
Not because they’re unusual.
Because when I see them later, they remind me of something far more important than the pebble itself.
They remind me how I felt.
The warmth of the sun.
The sound of the sea.
The cool water around my ankles.
The quiet contentment of being there.
Nobody else has ever seen those moments.
They weren’t photographed.
They weren’t shared.
But they are no less real because of that.
In fact…
Perhaps they belong to me more because they weren’t.
I sometimes wonder whether we’ve quietly inherited another expectation.
That happiness should be visible.
That peace should be documented.
That contentment should somehow be proved.
But maybe real contentment doesn’t need witnesses.
Maybe it doesn’t need likes or comments or photographs.
Maybe it simply asks us to be fully present while it’s happening.
To notice the warmth of a mug between our hands.
The taste of Jelly Tots.
The sea moving the sand beneath our feet.
To let the moment belong completely to us.
Because if nobody else ever sees it…
It still happened.
It still mattered.
Perhaps I’d rather carry the memory than the photograph.
Not because photographs aren’t wonderful, they are.
But because I don’t want my first instinct to be proving a moment happened.
I’d rather be fully inside it while it does.
And perhaps the most beautiful moments in our lives are the ones that never make it onto a screen.
Because real contentment doesn’t ask for an audience.
It simply asks us to be there.