The Moment It Clicks

GoldenSea_9362, originally uploaded by carolsLittleWorld.

The other day, I was talking with somebody about photography and the arts in general. He told me that he had, “thought about photography” a bit but had also done music and tried a few other things, some art-related and some not. This is when I was reminded how lucky I am.

You see, I too played some of the “monkey toil” games. I played music for a while, I wrote a novel, I did a bunch of stuff before I happened upon a camera and my life changed for good. I’ve always said I was very lucky because I knew, almost from the moment I picked up the camera, that *this* now *this* was what I was supposed to do. Sure, I picked up the camera a bit later in life then maybe I would have liked to and, yeah, it would have been just *ducky* if I had discovered my love of photography when I was younger and could maybe go to school to pursue my dreams (rather than “wasting” my time in engineering school) but, on the whole? Yeah, I’m so much better off. Allow me to explain.

Some people, you see, never find out what they are *supposed* to do. Some people never find their bliss, as it were. They never have that moment, that single moment of clarity when it all just hits them upon the head and BAM! they suddenly (or maybe not so suddenly!) know what it is they are supposed to do when they grow up. Some just waddle through life like a lost duck, like a Roomba in search of dust bunnies hiding in the elusive corners of the universe only stuck perpetually bumping into the stairs or the closet door. Trapped. Trapped is what they are, I tell you, trapped. And me? Yeah, I’m so much luckier than that. I know what I want to do, I just have to figure out a way to do it. I just have to take what it is I want to do, what it is I’ve discovered as “my calling” (as it were) and make it happen.

So, I told my friend, the one I was talking with about this, “I’m very lucky. You see, I know what I want, I just have to figure out a way to make it all just…work. But, to not know what you want…man, that’s like some kind of horrible torment.” And, it is, it really is. Tormented by that nagging feeling that you should be, you want to be doing something else, anything else but you just don’t know what that something is. That’s a cold, dark place really and I’m happy I don’t have to languish there. Frankly, I’m glad I didn’t have to stay in that place for long. No, for me, learning how to make it work is so much better than trying to figure out what you want in life.

Until next time…