My life through my lens

A couple of months ago, I started out on a particularly depressive phase of my life, marked with enough instability and uncertainty to drive anyone crazy. It is inconsequential what happened to me or why, because ultimately it’s always something or the other in everyone’s life. Life has a certain overbearing way of introducing big ripples into the most tranquil of lives. It doesn’t matter what the causes of your own personal woes may be, but there is always that one moment in everyone’s lifetime when life just seems unbearable suffocating. And I had arrived at mine.

It was somewhere in the midst of all that chaos that I got interested in photography. In the past, I had always tagged a camera along with me when I traveled but now, in the midst of the turmoil I was going through, I turned to photography as a daily distraction. I needed something to take my mind off what was going on within me, and I took up photography as a hobby. I started tinkering around more with my camera, taking it with me everywhere I went, carrying it with me every day, and capturing the most mundane things on its lens. One day, as I walked my dogs in the evening, I captured a family of ducks that had waddled along our way. Another day, driving along my way, I stumbled upon an interesting looking church I had never noticed before and photographed that. A bright red maple leaf here, a stark white birch tree there. Fall leaves on the withered summer grass, winter snow on the drenched fall leaves. I photographed it all.

And slowly, almost unnoticeably a transformation started to take place. It is difficult to hate life in the same breath in which you remark at its beauty. The more I searched my world for the perfect shot of the day, the more beautiful the world around me became. In my quest for the best photo, I started noticing little things I hadn’t noticed before – how the fuzzy blossom of the dandelion has the tiniest little hair, how a duck’s tail has just the perfect curl, how bright red winter berries can brighten up the gloomiest of days. The mundane, ordinary things around me that I’d taken for granted suddenly radiated with a hidden beauty. And I slowed down. I paused to finally admire life.

Photography to me is almost meditative. In that one instance in which you shut off the rest of the world to capture the one image on your viewfinder, you catch a vision of life at its finest. In that one moment in which I zoom out the world and focus in on the delicate cap of snow sitting on a wildflower’s head, everything else about life seems trivial and inconsequential, and all the beauty of the world seems contained within that one glimpse of life that I peer at through my lens. Life in that moment is beautiful, no matter what else. After months of passing life by, I finally started to pay attention. And instead of agonizing over a future out of my hands, I started to live life in the now. Somewhere in the turmoil of my heart, photography brought me the calm peace that follows a good cry.

As I flip through the pages of the photo album of my life over the past few months, I don’t see pages filled with the fears, anxieties and insecurities that comprised my days. Instead, I see the fun filled moments that made me laugh on an otherwise gloomy day. Or how tranquil the day was when my heart was aching. Or how much there was to be thankful for even when I felt utterly ungrateful. They capture just how beautiful life was even on the days when I thought my life was an abysmal mess. And they fill me with hope. They heal my broken heart.

Of all the life lessons that photography has taught me, perhaps the most important is this – no matter how ugly and gray life may seem on the gloomiest of days, when you crop out its ugliness, zoom in and capture it in just the right frame, life is always beautiful. No matter what else.

~vagabond~ © 2008.