I am having a quiet morning … just me, the kitties, a coke zero and some fireballs. The door is ajar so that Coco and Lola can wander in and out at their leisure and in the yard outside I hear the sounds of small birds chirping, while a Hawk in the tree-tops calls out for his mate.
It couldn’t be a more serene moment if I tried.
As I paused and thought that this is likely the first completely quiet moment in weeks, I remembered that Brittany and I went to Cypress Pointe a couple of weeks ago and I hadn’t done anything with the images yet.
This is one of the pitfalls with taking a lot of images … when one good shoot is quickly followed by another, images become stockpiled within folders on my drive and risk never seeing the light of day.
Strange thing is, we hadn’t planned on going to Cypress Pointe at all but when we got to Picnic Island so that she could practice with her hoop, it was closed because police had just found a body of some poor unfortunate woman. Cypress Pointe was our plan B.
Both places face west so they are great for sunsets in that respect. I normally choose Picnic Island though because there is rarely more than a few people there.
Cypress Pointe in contrast is a well-known and often overly-busy spot crawling with people from one end to the other.
So while Brittany hooped, I decided to use the strangers for my own devices and they became unidentified silhouettes as the sun went down.
I enjoyed the interplay with foreground features that framed both the sun and people and I hope you like this little collection from the shoot.
Looking through these images this morning, my thoughts drifted onto the whole aspect of Plan B.
There are many instances where we are faced with a complication that stops us from being able to pursue something and so we can either get back in the car and go home and sulk, or adapt and find something else to pursue.
In my mind, we should never accept defeat, so the latter is always the right response.
But beyond immediate moments, like this one, have you ever noticed how our entire lives are actually Plan B?
I can’t imagine there isn’t a single person out there among the billions on the planet who is living exactly the life they might have originally planned.
We may be happy with our lives. Or we may not. But invariably things happen to all of us that alter our paths and most of us adapt and move on.
I don’t know about you but I can barely successfully plan a 24 hour period so what chance do any of us have over an 80 year lifespan?
It’s why we have divorces, career changes, and the back space button on the keyboard. Decisions that seemed perfect or permanent at one moment in time, unravel and appear naive or simply wrong at the next.
There is a chaos factor at play in all our lives. It deals us with life-altering variables that force us to adjust something, somewhere, or somehow.
But that’s OK. It’s why we have a brain and not just a computer processor. We see, evaluate, adapt, and move on. It’s what makes us a successful species. Humans are very good at it. We live our lives doing it.
We should embrace each twist and turn that creates a plan B, because at the end of the day, chaos rules and our win is a matter of how we have adapted.
Feeling sorry for ourselves or getting depressed is a one-way ticket to Palookaville (always wanted to use that phrase). Which is what Marlon Brandon’s character was moaning about in the 1954 movie, On The Waterfront.
“I coulda had class. I coulda been somebody. I coulda been a contender.” he moaned.
But couldn’t we all?
I mean, at different points along this journey, I have second-guessed myself on some of life’s decisions, but the reality is that in most cases, while it feels the decision is ours to make, we are really just experiencing a shift into our next plan B.
So, embrace the changes, adapt to where they bring you, and enjoy the ride. Because that is what plan B really is; a roller coaster that sweeps us through twist and turns, rises and falls, as it leads us to our final destiny.
