At what point does documenting your life leave you no time to actually live it? I am constantly tortured by the idea that I’m not capturing memories. That I’m failing to record all those special moments. So periodically, I go into a frenzy of photo taking, inspired by the thought of all those heart-warming occasions I’ll have on film.

But here’s the problem: it’s hard to truly appreciate a moment when you’re looking at it through a viewfinder. Or worse, forcing your poor subject to wait while you dash to get your camera, urging:  “Just do it again, exactly like before.” And then, “Oh, silly mummy didn’t have the flash on, can you just do it one more time? Yes, fall over spontaneously into the dog’s bowl again, OK? Now wipe the Pal off your face and do it once more like the first time. Ha, ha, isn’t that funny! Oh wait, the battery is flat, I missed it. This is really the last time, I promise.”

Apparently, the most common way to die on a mountain climb is at the summit when you lift your camera to your eye to capture the view, lose your balance and fall to your death. Is this the universe trying to tell us something?

Years ago, I read a Nicole Kidman interview that stuck in my mind. Then still married to Tom, Nicole told how they’d decided to stop taking home movies of their children. They’d realised they were spending too much time filming milestones instead of experiencing them. She remarked wryly that the kids would no doubt eventually resent them because they wouldn’t have hours of childhood movies like their friends. And this is exactly where I get stuck. I want to live in the moment but I also want to capture it.  So how do you live in the present when you’re trying to turn it into the past so you can look back on it from the future?

Apart from the lack of spontaneity, the biggest challenge in documenting your life is the damn time it takes. Invariably, all those photos start piling up, waiting for you to sort them into albums (real or virtual) or email them or print them or upload them to Flickr. Last weekend I was so busy downloading, uploading and off-loading months’ of family photos, I missed out on spending time with the family in question.

I’m not alone in my soup of sentimentality and angst. People have been observing for a while now that we are the generation who won’t leave anything behind. Other than environmental damage. I have boxes of letters and photos going back to primary school but the letters stop in the nineties and the photos stop around 2004 when life began to go virtual. My son has half a dozen photo albums documenting his babyhood. A few years later when my daughter was born? Not a tangible thing. Yes, she has albums but between one child and the next, this word has come to represent something entirely different – a collection of photos on my computer. Sure, there are hundreds of them but where he’ll have volumes, she’ll have….a hard disk? The idea of grabbing your photo albums in case of fire is now virtually redundant. You simply grab your computer.

A friend recently discovered her digital camera also takes movies. On her recent Christmas holiday to Portsea / Pearl Beach, she dived into the task of making a home movie. Cue obsession. “Almost immediately, I fancied myself as the cinematic love child of Baz Luhrman and Martin Scorcese,” she confessed to me over lunch last week. “Within three days I became a bossy nightmare. If an activity wasn’t going to be filmed, I didn’t see the point of it. Going to watch Happy Feet at the local cinema? How is that going to enhance my movie? It’s dark there. No. “ Similarly, she began to frog-march her family towards photogenic activities that would enhance her film: “Let’s have surfing lessons! Let’s feed the neighbours’ chickens! Let’s dance with the Hari Krishnas at the markets!” Each night, she ignored her families pleas to join them for board games or DVDS, preferring to edit on her laptop, cutting and pasting clips, mixing the soundtrack and feeling generally smug and obsessed. But wait, there’s more.

“One day I decided I wasn’t in the movie enough so I made my husband film me doing ‘spontaneous’ things like cartwheels on the beach or running into the surf. Later, he observed that every time I appeared in the film I resembled a deranged girl in a tampon commercial – running and jumping and laughing like a lunatic.” I must admit that I’m guilty of being a bit too taken with my computer slide shows. After a recent overseas trip, I decided my ‘work’ was so good it should be shared. That’s how I came to bring my laptop out to dinner with friends one night soon after our return. Can’t come to slide night? No matter! Because we’ll bring it to you! When my husband suggested I tour the restaurant with my laptop, showing the slide show to tables of strangers, my eyes lit up before I realised he was joking. Is there a rehab program for people who film too much? Surely its mantra would be ‘step aw-aaay from the camera and focus on life’. I might just try it.