Day 7

One thing I have enjoyed since I was a little kid is taking pictures. I always loved landscape photography and would constantly be looking for that perfect shot. I think a lot of this desire to capture the perfect picture drove me to love traveling. Whenever I would see a magazine like National Geographic or Time or any sort of traveling magazine with incredible shots I would instantly want to travel to the place just so I could try and capture the same picture or even one-up the picture I saw. Back in the days when you had to load real film in the back of a camera it made it very difficult to hone this skill. In fact, I would often frustrate my mom who would be the one buying the film because I would experiment by trying to get a good angle on something and missing the mark therefore wasting a roll of film.

The digital world did help with this, as it simplified the editing and deleting process wasting no resource outside of a few seconds of time. When I got my own digital camera I went to town. My old computer is loaded with all kinds of pictures that I took, of which I still look at from time to time to get a good laugh. I remember a trip I went on with my friends from high school the summer after we graduated and while everyone was talking and entertaining themselves in the car on the way down I was taking pictures out the window of the beautiful Virginia mountains with the sun peaking between crests. In almost all of my travels I take more pictures of inanimate objects and landscapes than I do of the people I actually travel with.

There are photographers that I am envious of. Those photographers who really know how to capture the emotion of a moment. I think it is absolutely brilliant what some people are able to do with a camera. But what I have found is that it is actually impossible to literally capture a moment. This is a hard reality because there are moments that we share with people where we wish time would just stand still or that we could go back to those times and relive exactly what we felt at those very special moments. Chances are as you are reading this you have some moments flooding to your head without any prompting.

As I was writing this I didn’t know exactly where it was going, but I started to realize how much I can tend to live in the past and dwell on moments that have already happened. I go in waves of doing this, but I think the thing that God is trying to tell me is that I need to trust that there will be more moments. I don’t know what they will look like, but I won’t ever know as long as I am dwelling on the past. Obviously that is way easier said than done and there are still moments that I will hold on to and cherish all my life and that isn’t a bad thing. But I don’t want that to keep me from living in the present and making moments happen in the here and now.