You can't hold it all anyway.

I read that the eye moves 50 times a second, taking in as much as it can of the world, faster than we can conceive. If that is true, then what happens to all those images? When days seems to disappear too quickly under the covers of night. And weeks and months are swept up before we know it into the translucent containers of memory.

On holiday we seem to pay more attention to things, don't we? I remember my first trip to Europe. My mind recorded all the little new subtleties. Smells and breezes. Steamed milk and colors of skin. Shadows blending with my own. Rain falling on cobblestones. Shades of birds’ voices and sounds of sky. The brightly colored squeak of a shaved door from a shadowy alleyway as I pass under a rusted and peeling sign which swings carelessly like a child in the wind of my imagination. I open a heavy door into a musty used book store where a stooped old man with hair sprouting from his ears and elbow patches on his worn corduroy jacket offers me a plastic cup of sherry to sip while I browse, even though it’s not really cold outside.

It doesn't take me long to figure out that I just can’t hold it all. The world is too big. So I carry a journal. And I use it. The journal is a see-through container.