A snapshot of life ....... looking through a different lens

Think about the last time you met someone new. It might have been in work, through a club or society or introduced through a friend at a social function. How did you decide whether or not you liked that person? How did you get to know them? Did you bother to get to know them? Just dwell on that for a moment. Think about the first things that came into your mind – if they were tall or short, attractive or unattractive, well turned out, wearing expensive jewellery, driving a nice car. I bet that nearly everything that went through your mind was in some shape or form a judgment based on material effects. I know when I arrived at my photography seminar and we went around the room and introduced ourselves it became very evident who had the best or worse camera. Mine was way down at the bottom end of the range and do you know, when that was pointed out to me, it drained a bit of positive feeling from how I was felt about being there. I learned during that introduction that you could tell the value of someone’s lens by the colour of the rim – it was either silver (cheapest, the one I have), gold or red (the most expensive, better glass apparently). And do you know, I’d really rather have been left in the dark(room) because it made me doubt the quality of the equipment I had and its performance even though, for me, it had cost what seemed like an awful lot of money. And by association, it made me judgmental about the equipment other people had and the corollary of which is that you start to place a credit against their personal worth or value. Perhaps a bit immature I know, but its human nature and I am in no doubt that we were all doing the same. Yet the youngsters on the Namibia project didn’t seem to care about someone’s background, what clothes they were wearing or how expensive their sunglasses were, they just wanted to flock, like birds, and that created a sense of fun and inclusion for them. The adults on the project, that’s me and about five others, just didn’t gel in the same way, none of us. We did our stuff, ate our meals together because that’s what happened and then after some polite conversation and a passable amount of time retired into our own little worlds, whether that meant reading a book, going to our room or just a bit of solitary wandering around the place. And the kids, well they were off smoking, drinking and generally making their trip a trip of a lifetime, whether it was or not. So that leads onto another thought. Maybe when you get older you have so many more things to compare against each other that it’s easy to become jaundiced and stop just enjoying things for what they are. We stop making the best of a situation and jump to thinking about all the reasons why something isn’t ideal or perfect rather than the things that do hit the mark. We stop finding fun and enjoyment in everything that life has to offer and that’s a bummer actually because, bloody hell, life’s pretty short when you think about it - remember the 254,360 useable hours in the Not Quite Back in the Zone post on page 3. So, readers, next time you are in a situation of meeting someone new, engage with them like you are eighteen again and go beyond the external props and find out instead about the real them. Then who knows, smoking, drinking and partying might ensue. Metaphorically speaking of course.