04.24.08
Posted in Life as it is, Mistakes, Twitter
at 3:36 pm
I have been busy lately. Lots of things have been happening, and so of course I have been making mistakes and learning from them.
- My photography class on wildflower photography was a success, but an uncalibrated monitor taught me a lot more about post processing than I ever imagined.
- I won a $1 bet with a friend of mine about redecorating and designing my home computer room. What I learned about 10-year old dirt in the corners is not sharable on a family-rated blog. (My teens read this, I fear.) I also got a crash course in vacuum maintenance.
- I found an unexpected sunset hour to photograph birds in Brazos Bend State Park, and learned not to look away from alligators that are within six feet of me
But there has been another learning mistake as well. I mentioned previously the White Bread Warning, that if I use the same recipe, I will get the same bread. And I am finding that to be absolutely true in regards to this blog and my Twitter feed.
Time and again, I think of something interesting to write, and decide instead that it can wait a day because at least my Twitter entries, or tweets, are still being posted for that day. And then days become weeks, and the weeks start to stretch on as well. Pretty soon, I have the same result of empty blogging - a blog made up of tweet entries. And my main thoughts and ideas that I want to share being put off again and again.
So it is time to take the bull by the horns and turn off the feature that took tweets and made them blog entries. It’s a neat feature, but I am falling into the same trap I fell into previously. I will still keep the Twitter sidebar up of what I am recently doing, but those tweets just won’t become posts.
This forces me to write and to write regularly. And trust me, I need the practice! And well, I always have some wisdom to share that I learned from some recent mistake.
This way, when I next want to share with you how I learned that sandals offer zero toe protection from “stubbing impact” because of my error in not looking where I am going - well, now I will have to really blog about it and not rely on the tweets catching it anyway….
Permalink
04.11.08
Posted in Life as it is, photography
at 11:45 pm
I am a nature photographer. And I have observed myself with insects when I go out. Somewhere near the beginning of my arrival “in the wild” I am hyper aware of anything crawling or landing on me or mosquitoes or bees nearby. But 20to 30 minutes later, i could care less. I am bigger than them and they pose no real risk to me - I may itch later, but for now I can’t be bothered.
I believe this is a veneer of the modern, sterile-seeming world I like to believe I am a part of when I am working my day job in a controlled environment like my home or my office. It takes a bit of effort to throw that veneer off and be an animal in the woods - but I do it - and I love it.
But it rolls back so quickly. The morning after spending a day in the swamps shooting, while driving to the office, I see antennae pop out from behind my driver’s-side visor. Interesting…. Then there are more antennas - lots more. And do I handle it like the nature photographer that I am? No, I handle it like a city boy who is driving to work and is strapped into his chair with unknown creepy-crawlies emerging inches from his face.
Which is to say that I nearly wrecked, stopping in the middle of the street and bailing from my car.
It turns out to be a mess of young caterpillars - I don’t know what sort they were. I recovered and moved them out of my car - and after finding more near my car, I took it for a carwash. I didn’t get any photos, even though my camera was in the car with me - that should tell you how rattled I am.
So tomorrow I am off to shoot wildflowers. And I know it will take a while to let that veneer of expected sterility fall away. But may I be open to the wonders of the natural world as it does - and also maybe come home with only an itch or two.
Permalink
04.10.08
Posted in Life as it is, Spiritual Journey, photography
at 11:59 pm
I love to learn. Sometimes, though, I forget how little I know, and in so doing I lose my chance to learn something. This is a character defect of mine, this arrogant pride of my intelligence, and it can lead me into being an arrogant know-it-all if I let it get away from me.
But how to do so? That’s a real question….
I’ve worked against this a long time - and not always with success. If the opposite of being proud is to be humble, then I needed to work on being humble, i thought. I tried this and it never worked for me. CS Lewis had it right when he wrote as Screwtape, a senior demon in hell, to Wormwood, Screwtape’s nephew - an apprentice demon on his first assignment in the field. Screwtape warned that humility was fatal to demon-kind, but easily defeated as his advice went.
“Your patient has become humble; have you drawn his attention to this fact? All virtues are less formidable to us once the man is aware he has them, but this is specially true of humility. Catch him at the moment when he is really poor in spirit and smuggle into his mind the gratifying reflection, ‘By jove! I’m being humble,’ and almost immediately pride - pride at his own humility - will appear”
So how to defeat this, when to try by will alone is to create some sort of proud false-modesty? Yuck! That’s even worse than being a know-it-all in my book. It’s true that the only thing worse than false pride is false modesty.
The answer is in something simple - it is in not trying to be humble. It is in trying to simply stay teachable. In fact, if i can stay teachable in all situations, and with all people then i am coming closer to something good - something close enough to being humble that the difference doesn’t matter.
“Every man you meet is your superior in some way. In that you should learn from him”
Abraham Lincoln
Tonight was the classroom discussion for a wildflower photography class I decided to take. I took it because I recognize the instructor as a master at nature photography, and every time I have gone to one of his workshops, I am amazed at how little I know and how much he can teach me.
So once again tonight, I arrived and since it was a lecture, I found myself skeptical as to what I could learn and couldn’t i skip this lecture - after all, I have already heard several of his lectures. But I could be teachable, so I took out my notebook, and started writing notes on his ideas and the structure of his lecture and anything else I could learn and be taught. And as I opened myself up to being teachable, I found myself learning about topics of which I knew nothing, and seeing the results of ideas I had read about but never seen attempted. This being teachable stuff works!
May we all become teachable a little more today than we were yesterday.
Permalink
04.09.08
Posted in Life as it is, Mistakes, Spiritual Journey, family
at 10:01 pm
I found a note in some old writing of mine that says, “If I ever figure out how to celebrate my imperfections, why, I could have a life of constant celebration.”
My inner critic has really been kicking up a storm lately. I was complaining to someone about how I broke a promise to my son to run an errand for him tonight, and that my teen aged daughter was having an emotional meltdown concerning the telephone. I found myself yearning to be a better dad than I am, and to have better skills than I have, and be better organized than I am.
This is the point where I usually will excuse myself for a short self-pity break. Then I came across this brief story in some of my old journals:
A man visited his Rabbi. He sat and said that he had spent his life trying to live according to what the Rabbi taught, but after all these years he had gained nothing. He was still an ignorant and foolish man. The Rabbi turned to him and said, ”But you have gained an awareness that you are ignorant and foolish, and that is something.”
And now, things are still the same in my home. It is hard to be a single father of two teens. It is hard to stay organized and work like i do and also have my own hobby and life. And I have spent a lot of time working and studying and learning and trying and counseling and being counseled and still I am not the father and man I want to be. No matter how long it seems I have been traveling this road, I am just not there yet.
But, I have gained an awareness of the fact that I am not yet the man I want to be. And that awareness of my imperfections is something of value. And it must really be something too, because i can almost catch a glimmer of what it is to celebrate my imperfections and that there is such a well-perceived gap between who I am and who I want to be.
Tonight I celebrate my imperfections. Tomorrow, I will continue my journey. Who will join me in the party and the adventure?
Permalink
04.08.08
Posted in Life as it is, Mistakes, photography
at 8:19 am
In his book, The Secrets of Consulting, Gerald Weinberg uses parables and simple summaries to make his points about consulting. It’s a great book, and one I suggest to everyone that wants to become a consultant.
But consulting is not why I was thinking of one of those simple summaries on Saturday night, sitting in the mud in a marsh in a state park. I was sitting in the mud, having just fallen backwards, for the second time. That’s when Weinberg’s White Bread Warning came to me.
White Bread Warning:
“If you use the same recipe, you get the same bread.”
I had a burst of wisdom the moment before I fell the second time when I realized that I had been doing just what I was doing right before the first time I fell in the mud. I was photographing spider lilies in a muddy marsh and was lowering my tripod by changing the angle of the legs, and I started with the leg opposite me. This moved the tripod closer to me and meant I needed to step backwards. This muddy marsh was sucking our boots into itself and it often took a real effort to pull my feet free. So sure enough, I needed to step backwards again, my feet were stuck, and so backwards into the mud and marshwater I went… again.
Some people will recognize the White Bread Warning as a corollary to the insanity of “Trying the same thing again and again, expecting different results.” I have often heard the same idea expressed as:
If you keep doing what you are doing, you will keep getting what you are getting.
So, since I was no longer dry, I decided to stay on my knees in the mud and water and lower my tripod that way, and then shot from my knees. Here’s the shot that I got as a result:
Learning when I have a bad recipe and then making changes is, in some ways, pretty basic stuff. But it’s also the very basis of the sort of wisdom that comes from making mistakes.
After all, as a consultant to myself - that is advising myself on better ways to get through my day - I need to always be on the lookout for where recipes don’t work. Because one possible corollary of the White Bread Warning might be summed up as:
If I use a better recipe than i was using before, I will get better bread.
And I know I could use better bread than what I usually make for myself….
Permalink
