Yesterday morning when I drove down by Hollis Gardens, it was just 5 am and dark and the night had been filled with rain. So all around me was wet.
I don’t remember exactly what I had in mind to shoot, but I was loosely thinking I would use some of the rope lights and perhaps get something wet or dripping and get the light to hit it with different colors.
Beyond that loose thought, there was nothing very solid in my plans and you could tell because the shoot fell apart very quickly on me.
Plants and lights in the dark, are not really a good mix and it became apparent to me very quickly that nothing I was trying was working as I imagined.
Most experiments that I fail in are victims of some poor execution or outside influences that I didn’t expect. But in this instance, it was the plan itself (albeit a loose one) that was flawed.
Anyone who knows me, know that I “never” delete pictures, but in this case, I deleted almost all. I could point to the blurring caused by rather windy conditions, but even if they had been in focus, they would have been useless.
Here at the bottom of the blog are the only three worth sharing and I guess the middle one is my favorite, as the street light nearby lit up the rear of the flower yellow while I hit it with white from the front. And against the very dark sky as background, it presents a rather unusual view, I guess.
Hope you enjoy.
I drove home enormously disappointed with myself and questioned why I had even gone at all. Was I genuinely trying to take some novel shots or was I just trying to escape from the early morning kitty-chaos here?
Who knows?
But either way, I questioned why I thought it was ok to embark half-assed on a project, when objectively I could have told that it was destined for failure.
And I thought back through my life and could pick out several times when I approached other important stuff in something less than a fully committed state. What lessons had I learned at all? Because for certain, each of those instances were failures that have damaged me and those around me.
I asked myself why do we sometimes take this kind of approach on anything? Is it an innocent hope that perhaps something will work out anyway? Is it a genuine “I don’t care” to whether we succeed or not? Is it a laziness that fools us into thinking that what we are doing might be just enough to pull it off?
When we lose in an effort that we were less than fully committed to, we rarely dissect it later to critique our own involvement. We don’t hold ourselves accountable because whatever the effort was, it wasn’t really sufficiently important for us to give a full commitment.
So, we end up learning nothing and are bound to repeat it all again some other day.
I know my own failings over the years. I know where I have let myself down or let others down.
When I have failed but gave it a genuine try then at least I showed I cared and I can draw that condolence from the defeat.
As I have written before, those failures give us the basis to learn a better way or learn what our own limitations are. So the defeat itself is not a complete loss.
But to lose for the sake of not even trying enough, then shame! I should have just stayed in bed.
There is a dishonesty in a half-hearted approach to something. We give the outward appearance that we are trying, but are really not. Sometimes this dishonesty is meant to persuade someone else and sometimes we are just fooling ourselves.
When you fool yourself, you have created the ultimate fool. This is the person who believed you were trying to do something, while at the same time knowing you aren’t.
Unless you have some mental defect, you know yourself.
You know all your failings, your secrets, your losses. You don’t display them for the world to see, but you know what they are.
So, the last person you should ever be able to fool, is yourself.
And yet we do.
Is it that we like to be fooled? Do we choose willful blindness to what we already know to be true?
Is there a bit of masochist in all of us, that we want to fail?
Most of us don’t try to deliberately fail at something. and yet occasionally we do.
So, I guess where my mind arrived at by the time I got home was that within all of us, there is the lazy, foolish, half-hearted person that every now and then makes an appearance in our lives.
He never produces anything positive for us and yet we repeatedly allow him the stage to do so. “Do your best” we say, as we pat him on the back and he walks out to centers stage. But he doesn’t have a “best” so he won’t.
Time to get the stage hook out for that guy.
… just a thought.
