The tree in an old photograph gives scale to years nobody measured while living them.

Time passing is not something you can feel happening. The years between one photograph and the next were lived one ordinary day at a time, none of which announced itself as part of a period, and no one was keeping count. Then a tree that was waist high in the picture is above the roof, and the stretch becomes measurable.

Take a photograph of something in your life that changes slowly, and put it somewhere you will find it again. In ten years it will tell you what the intervening days never could while you were inside them.