Upon Closer View

It was one of those things where the details completely escape you at the moment and only later that you end up noticing something quite spectacular.

Yesterday’s haul from Honeymoon Island ended up soaking in a bucket overnight and then I hosed them off this morning and put them outside to dry.

On the finger-shaped coral piece I noticed teeny floral-like imprints embedded into it and Morgan this morning noticed the same in another chunk of coral.

We haven’t had any luck identifying it yet but to give you an idea, each flower shape is about a millimeter in diameter. If I hadn’t accidentally noticed it in an image I took, it is so small that I probably wouldn’t have at all.

So this morning, I lit the two pieces properly in studio and took a small few shots that would correctly bring out the detail.

I have added four of them at the end of this blog and hope you enjoy.

The thought that I was left with that forms the subject of this blog is how we go through life in a rush caught between taking in the bigger picture and missing out on the finer details.

We certainly don’t want to miss the big picture. This is what guides us in our best direction through life and provides us the overall plan that our journey follows.

But we also have to occasionally stop and take a closer look at things so that we don’t miss out on things that potentially constitute our most enjoyable moments.

Oftentimes, we push through the years, glibly dealing with the finer points of life while we pursue what we consider bigger things.

For example, we just consume the dinners our mom puts on the table without thought of her effort in their creation. Only later to realize that she is gone and we have no idea how she created such fare.

Or we take work home with us and become consumed in our efforts to get ahead at the job, oblivious to the first steps that little Debbie took or how Brad scored the winning goal for the junior varsity team and became a momentary hero.

In these types of instance, we typically get reminders in later life of what we have missed. Mom dies, the kids grow up. And we strain for memories of both and we feel sad.

But the vast majority of detail that we missed, never reappears. We don’t even know we lost it. We are oblivious to the fact that it was even occurring. And this becomes an invisible sadness within us; not even knowing what we missed out on.

Yes, we aren’t left looking at a grainy polaroid of a time long gone and wishing for “the good old days”. But we spend our lives in a diluted or paler version of what we could be experiencing.

Failing to live our life to its fullest potential is probably something that happens to us all. We each come up short on what could have been and this is primarily because we all have short-comings and occasionally have failings.

But living a poorer life because we raced through it not noticing what was right before our eyes, is nothing to do with our short-comings. Yet is everything to do with our failings.

“Taking time to stop and smell the roses” is a well-worn phrase and yet most of us never do that. We run through life as if in a race to get to the end, when each step we take provides us an opportunity to pause and take in the details of our journey itself.

… just a thought.