A Memory Shared

So, this morning, I met a friend at Starbucks in Tampa and then continued on to Ballast Point to watch the sun come up.

The air was fresh, with a gentle breeze coming in off the bay and the temperature was in the mid-sixties. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky and for a little while we gazed at the horizon as it began to define and at the star-filled skies overhead, while we sipped our hot Mochas.

This was completely unadulterated luxury to me; I cannot imagine a single thing on earth I would rather have been doing at that moment.

The horizon flushed with soft peaches that morphed into deep oranges before paling away as the sun came up and my early-morning companion was kind enough to let me silhouette her in my shots as a foreground on the pier. I hope you like some of these shots … a couple of them are my favorites of the year so far.

We parted company after a little bite to eat, where we revisited much of the experience and talked about our shared feelings for the natural life. And as I drove home, my mind wandered onto how this experience was so very different for me than almost all my other shoots.

The difference revolved around the fact that 99% of the time I shoot alone and this time I got to share the moment with someone of an ilk mind. Someone who marveled as I did at the changes of colors, the wonderful birds that dotted the skies, and the freshness of the air as it filled our lungs with the arrival of fall.

In a material world, when you share something with someone you always get less. But in a natural moment like this, the sharing actually gave you more. You not only got to enjoy everything your own senses gave you but you also basked in the reflected glory of the moment as seen through the eyes of someone who genuinely cared.

The enriched experience is something we can only absorb when we are with people that add to it. Not everyone fits that parameter and we all have people in our lives that mute our laugh and dull our smiles. So it behooves us to seek out those that enrich rather than detract and then share as many experiences with them as possible.

This is one of the reasons that the sentiment expressed in the “no man is an island” adage is so important to embrace. We need loved ones, or friends around us … people who are not only there to help during the bad times, but people who add to our good times.

In this social media driven world where people think “friend” is a Facebook categorization, it is important to grab hold of a few in our real-life and reflect our moments in them. We don’t need two and a half thousand friends following our postings; we need just a handful to share our lives with.

In choosing the right friends, we enhance our lives and the moments therein. And we in turn can enhance their’s.

Being a friend to someone is in itself reward enough, as the act of giving friendship warms up your own soul. Even if it does mean getting up at an ungodly hour and standing around with your coffee in your hand while some old guy with a camera tells you what a wonderful silhouette you are!

Thank you, Simona.

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