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Image:  instagram.com/skyzzle

Do you have a shoe box or old cigar box full of old photos?  I do. I like to pull it out every so often to glance at them.  None of the pictures are older than 30 years or so, I wish I had more of my grandparents and great grandparents.   My great grandfather helped to build the Titanic so they tell me. Would love to know if there are pictures of him floating around, would love to know what he looked like.

Photos help to link us to our past. They help to connect us to who we are, or who we were. When I look at old pictures of myself, I can’t believe how relatively normal I look, while remembering how insecure I always felt about how I looked. I don’t think there has ever been a time in my life where I have felt happy with my appearance.  Today I am happy. I can look in the mirror and accept that this is my 49 year old version. I try not to be so hard on myself, after all, we all get older and our bodies change, we lose our hair, the wrinkles come a creeping.

There’s a great scene at the very end of the film “The Shining.”  Music plays from the roaring twenties as the camera pans in on a large photograph of a New Years Eve party which took place at the Overlook hotel. The camera zooms right in on the main character, Jack Torrance, laughing, dressed in a tuxedo, having the time of his life.   Sometimes I wonder if there is a photo floating around of my great grandfather doing the same thing.

So, do you have a shoe box or cigar box full of old photos?  Send me a tweet so I can take a look.