Take What You Can Carry

by Gian Sardar

“Liv. Stop. Enjoy where you are. Nothing is wrong until it is.”

You don’t come from a world where you get to judge how I handle this.

This really hit me how our values, morals, experiences make up our judgments.

“We learned to live at night. To work, to bathe. When the time came, you had to run. Take what you could carry to the mountains. That is where we would go. The mountains were safe.”

You love someone because of who they are but also—and maybe more important—despite who they are.

Instead he’d dumped the rest inside the drawer, and both he and Olivia had learned to love it because it was her mother’s jumbled life, and there was something beautiful about the chaos, something that felt whole and complete and circular from the very fact that a handful of images would fly through time and reveal Olivia’s mother at all ages, like a full life lived.

The camera does not judge, a professor said. It captures. Judgment is what humans place upon the photo.