When I opened the front door a little after four this morning, there were some packages from Amazon left overnight. One was the new lens I had been waiting on yesterday, so I decided to take it down to the lake and see how it performed.
I was quite prepared to reject it as it was a lens manufacturer that I had no experience with and if the image quality isn’t good from it, then happy to send it back.
Once all the babies had been fed and taken care of, I took the camera and headed down by the pier. I know that I shoot a lot there, but it is a good spot with a lot of water round it but more importantly, it is very dark. No street lights and so if I want to shoot low-light, this is my best place to go.
I got down there just after they opened the place up and so for the first twenty minutes or so, it was just me, the pier, and occasional sounds from waking birds.
There is a genuinely magical aspect to experiencing a beautiful twilight in such a way. It is almost unlike any other experience and particularly when you are alone with your thoughts and distraction-free.
It was a clear-sky twilight so there were no mad clouds to set the skies on fire. But there was the most wonderful glow on the horizon that morphed from pastel hues to vibrant heat over a ten or fifteen minute period. And I was enthralled.
The new lens, by the way, performed just fine and it won’t be sent back to Amazon. I have attached some images at the end of the blog with what it manages to capture in low-light conditions. It is a keeper.
As I drove out of the parking lot to head home, I thought about the whole aspect of rejection and what it means.
Rejecting a bad product is something I am sure we all have experienced and it has little if any effect on us.
But in recent times, I have traveled a road that directed some serious rejection my way and this has had a profound effect on my sense of happiness.
Whether it was just a really bad year, or the fact that I am now old, the amount of rejection this past year seems to have exceeded all prior experiences and has come close to dragging me under a few times.
When we feel rejection as a younger person, it can be life-forming. If we are brimming with over-confidence, then we take the rejection as a learning experience or perhaps even just refuse it outright.
If we are young and vulnerable, it can push us further into our shell, damage our self-confidence, and have a pronounced effect on our goals in life.
By the time we hit old age, most people don’t experience a lot of rejection because old folk are notorious for sticking with routine and rarely challenging themselves. They tend to interact with the same people, try things they have already experienced and work within pre-defined limits that don’t really challenge them.
In fact, by not stretching themselves people (old or not) shield themselves from possible rejection to where they live muted lives.
Muted lives allow people to stabilize themselves into a slow moving pattern that guides them gently until they die. There is very little pain involved in such a life.
But I would argue that such a life is not a life at all. It is merely existing.
Regardless of our age, it is important to enrich our experience with new things, new people, new places. Yes, it may occasionally explode in our faces but it won’t kill us.
Just existing, on the contrary, will.
… just a thought.
