letting go is a teaching we have come to take as eastern in origin. we often think of monks and buddhists leading lives of no attachment, constantly ridding them selves of possession and materials goods, even heavier items like the ego.

is this age old practice we must now implement in the digital age of constant information. today we are always so distracted and finding ourselves being inundated by new forms of data and learnings and colors and shapes and news and videos and pictures and social statuses, streams of new things to distract ourselves. kind of like virtual baggage. we also feel, in this new age of constant information, that news gets old right away. finding out about a viral film a week later means you’ve already missed it. watching it may feel futile at times.

but my thoughts go to the sentimentality of web finds found. sometimes a soundbite we recall stumbling upon months ago exists like any real-world experience might: as the memory of an actual experience. You recall the several clicks that lead yourself there, but cannot recreate the route well enough to find it again. you didn’t book mark it or any of the pages clicks before or after. in fact you ended there by chance, like strolling through foreign city streets, you sometimes find yourself meandering the web and coming upon new bird species and languages you’ve never experienced before.

you’ve experienced a virtual sensory platform. a site, a destination that another person has created from another portal. you are taking part in their creation. like traveling over seas, you take a journey into the virtual ether to have your mind blown for a bit. and you remember those few minutes spent experiencing it.

we are living in a new wave of collective memory no doubt. a bank of memory we share and shape as we pass along. however, we have also entered a new species of personal memory whereby a virtual experience constitutes real memory feels - one with site and sound and visceral context.