Blog 6 of 30: Life In The Slow Lane

We are a product of our generation. We want everything fast, easy, cheap, and good. I am guilty of this. And if you say you are not, think about it. I am sure that you are probably guilty of it yourself. I am not going to speak against that tonight. I am just going to say that I feel we all need to appresh everything we run by everyday. We miss the nuances of life that make the boring, monotonous routines we fall into worth it.

Today, I saw something I have not seen in a long time around the Lew. Getting on my bike in front of Spellgirl, I notice a person bend over and pick up a leaf, freshly fallen and beautifully colored and covered in rain. They just looked at it. Appreshed it. I was amazed. I used to do that kind of thing, take in the beauty of the such an insignificant object. They just enjoyed that 5 seconds of their life with that pretty leaf instead of hurrying, bustling, worrying about the next thing life has coming.

I have been getting into photography recently. I use a slightly vintage Canon AE-1. It takes real nice pictures. The reason I bring up this hobby is the whole reason I got into film photography in the first place. I had a digital camera, like everyone else that has a digital camera or a camera phone. I would take a picture of someone, and then they would demand to see the picture and then hence delete if not up to their standards of self image. This bothered me. I felt slightly offended, but not offended. I wanted to capture that 1/250 of a second. But instead I was told to recapture the moment, to recreate something that has passed. I did not want to do that. So I went out and bought disposable cameras so people couldn't edit the tiny momeny I wanted to preserve. Then I eventually got my Canon AE-1 and the rest of history. I learned to enjoy the ugly pictures, the grainy, the misframed. I could not do anything about it, as people would say, I "rolled with the punches." Film photography is how life truly is. Life is not something we can edit to fit what we want. We need to accept our ugly moments, our beautiful moments, our stupid moments, our brilliant moments, our grainy moments, our misframed moments, our overexposed moments, our masterpiece moments.

Moral of the Story: Live life second by second. Everything is important, do not ignore anything.


To commemorate the the blurry:

www.flickr.com/coryvanmeter