Fred, who resides at Fragments from Floyd, posted a very nice piece there yesterday about my Weblog. He says he too thinks a lot about getting older and he related this excellent vision he once had:

“In this in-sight I saw the verb ‘aging’ to be akin to sailing, skating, surfing - an action verb implying the passage of the subject through a medium. The medium is time. It swirls past us as we remain constant, keeping our balance, wind in our faces. Its passage pulls at our skin, frays our joints, saps energy from muscles. But too, it gives us perspective, gives us laugh lines, makes us wise. But it does little to the core of our essential personhood that we have worn from the beginning.”

Yes! (she said, jabbing her fist toward the sky). Can’t you picture it. This feels so correct, so “right on” as we used to say. It is an image I will happily hold with me while I write about getting older here.

Fred also issued a challenge to all bloggers related to my banner up there at the top:

“Find ten photographs of you at different ages, up to the present. Make a Time Travel Montage and post it or a link to it on your weblog…This is a powerful image to me. I think this continuity of self you can see in such image-sequences could speak, too, to younger people who have not yet dealt with the reality of age - who perhaps fear it and shun or stereotype the chronologically gifted in a negative way. Whaddaya think?”

I think it’s a terrific idea, Fred. (Be sure to read all of Fred’s Challenge; I clipped part of it to quote more briefly here.)

Imagine a Website of such banners. And there is a bonus for you in doing this: the time you will spend plowing through and perusing old photos to find the ten you want to to use to demonstrate the years from childhood until now will bring forth floods of unexpected memories. Moments you have not thought of in years perhaps. Moods and feelings will return of the time and place a picture was made. There will be surprises you can't imagine until you do this.

You could lose several days on such a project, but it will pay you back many times over in personal pleasure, knowledge and understanding. And sometimes, it can even change beliefs about yourself and your life that you have held for years. I spent months sorting old pictures when I did my timeline fotolog and by the end, I had changed a whole lot of attitudes, ideas and beliefs that had been mouldering in the recesses of my memory for as long as some of the old photos.

So if you think Fred's Challenge is a good idea, get on with it. Start now. And pass it on by linking to Fred's Challenge to urge others to join in. Imagine if 10 people did this. And then 30 people. And then 50. "And friends," as Arlo Guthrie sang, "they may thinks it's a movement..."