CHAKAM! CHAKAM!

The beauty of frozen frames.

Last week, I found myself somewhere between dust and memory, flipping through old photographs my mum had carefully preserved. We had been looking for something specific, but as it always happens with these things, the search quickly dissolved into a myriad of conversations. One photo led to another, and suddenly we were no longer just looking for the picture that brought me, we were strolling down memory lane.

As we sifted through the stacks, it struck me how instinctive it is now, to reach for a camera only when we feel beautiful, when the light hits just right, when the day has declared itself worthy of documentation. Our instinct today is to pull out our cameras only when we look our absolute best.

We curate our lives in real time, preserving only the polished, the triumphant, the moments that feel like they belong in a frame.

But our parents did not love us that way. They were capturing everything.

Not just birthdays or Christmas mornings or days when our outfits matched our structured smiles but the in-betweens. A blurry shot of a messy living room, a candid of a nap on a Sunday afternoon. The sitting-on-the-floor kind of days. The nothing-is-happening-here moments that, somehow, have become everything. Grainy images of us doing absolutely nothing, and yet, now, they hold entire worlds inside them.

There is a sacred, haunting beauty in those random, basic photos of us doing absolutely nothing. These are the memories that actually matter the most.

So why then, do we only document the happy, polished moments? Why do we wait for perfection before we decide a moment is worth keeping?

Your life is constantly in motion. Documenting it is the only way you have to hold it still, even for a second. It is to freeze a frame and say, this happened, I was here, I lived through this moment.

I am not asking you to take a picture every day. I am not even asking you to share or post them. Think back to those physical photo albums our parents kept - the ones we would begrudgingly hand to visitors to flip through. They were offerings tucked into bounded leaflets, brought out for visitors, yes, but first and foremost, they belonged to us.

Your memories are yours before they are anyone else’s. They are keepsakes that immortalize a moment in time that you will eventually want to touch again. They belong to you first.

So when you feel crazy happy - the kind of joy that feels almost too big for your body to contain, pull out your phone. Capture the exact way you smiled in that moment, the specific light in your eyes, and even the clothes you wore that made you feel invincible. Chakam.

And when the world feels heavy, when you are not your best, when nothing about the day feels worth saving, take the picture anyway.

Chakam.

Because a full life is not made up of perfect moments.

It is a mosaic of all our combined memories - the soft ones, the hard ones, the forgettable ones that refuse to be forgotten.

We need these markers. We need to document the peaks and the valleys alike so that in the future, we can look back and see the full, unvarnished spectrum of the lives we’ve lived. Without the “boring” photos, we lose the context of our growth. Without the “sad” photos, we forget the strength it took to move past them.

Take the picture. Not for the gram, not for the aesthetic, but for the future version of you who will one day sit down with an archive and want to remember what it really felt like to be alive.

Take markers of your life.

So that one day, without meaning to, you will stumble into your own archive and find yourself there, alive in fragments, in laughter, in stillness and remember with a kind of quiet awe that you did not just exist. You lived.

Start now, as soon as you are done reading this post, chakam.

Chakam - a popular Nigerian social media slang and screenshot trend that mimics the sound of a camera shutter.

All my love,

Oreva.