Click here to watch my 1 Second Everyday video from 2016.
1 Second Everyday is an app that allows you to compile one second of footage from every day of your life. In the words of the 1SE site, it’s “a modern day visual diary.” By the end of the year, you’ve got a 365-second (or a little over six-minute) video of your life.
On January 1, 2016, I decided I’d try out 1 Second Everyday as my New Year’s resolution, thinking I’d end up forgetting too many days of videos and giving up before the end of the year. But I honestly did better than I thought I would. The finished product is far from perfect, and I did miss more days than I would’ve liked to, but that’s okay. I had a full phone-less week at camp over the summer, and between some smatterings of too-busy and not-busy-enough, there were days when I completely forgot to take a video.
Generally, I tried to record a moment that would be the most accurate depiction of what that day was. I wanted to try to capture how it would stick in my mind if I was able to naturally remember every single day of my life. That made for a wild conglomerate of quiet days reading, slow shifts at work, quality time with (or zooming in on the faces of) friends or one-second balls of sheer stress.
Throughout the year, it was nice to have the little videos to reflect on. It really is like a visual diary. As cheesy as it sounds, one of my favorite parts of 1SE was getting to watch friendships grow. The year started at the second semester of my freshman year, right when I had discovered the richness of “making friends.” 1SE helped me watch the growth of those friendships, many of those friends being the same ones featured in clips from the end of the year, which was the first semester of my sophomore year.
I knew compiling my video at the end of the year would be a cool experience, but it exceeded all of my expectations.
When I watched my year’s movie for the first time, I just about started crying. It startled me how beautiful I found it.Though it seems obvious, the video first and foremost struck me as visual. 1SE is such a unique way to remember. Mentally recalling memories brings back vague mental pictures and feelings. Re-reading journal entries brings back the feelings and thought-processes during a certain time. But a 1SE video offers a completely different remembering experience.
The clips go by so quickly, you don’t have time to digest anything internally. You’re just viscerally triggered by second after second of visual bits of your past year.
It was oddly nice to watch moments fly by before I had time to really soak them in.Certain seconds in the video had represented various highs or lows in the past year, but those particular seconds went by so quickly that I didn’t have time to conjure up those feelings they gave me; instead, in a literal split second, I was inexplicably forced to see beauty in them.
It forced me to see how real and good life is. Even if the fun, crazy, or serene scenes that make up most of my seconds aren’t what my life is like 24/7, those moments are still there. And the nature of those types of moments is that if they’re present at all, it’s easy to let them dominate. Friends are cool. Beauty is cool. Life is actually really cool.
I agree with Sheldon Vanauken when he writes in A Severe Mercy: “If there were a choice—and he suspected there was—a choice between, on the one hand, the heights and the depths and, on the other hand, some sort of safe, cautious middle way, he, for one, here and now chose the heights and the depths.” That quote resonates with me even more now that I've watched the beauty of my heights and depths of the year in six quick minutes.
If you’re looking for a unique New Year’s resolution, I strongly recommend 1 Second Everyday. If you’ve ever desired a movie of your life, or if you’re at all curious about seeing the heights and depths all at once – a mash of real life – try 1 Second Everyday.
