Something that has repeatedly spoke to me over the course of my lifetime has been the need to recognize and soak up the things that are beautiful in their own way that surround me every day. While I have known for a long time that their is beauty everywhere in life if you are willing to look hard enough to see it, I haven’t always been able to perfect the talent of really recognizing the good, the positive, the beautiful, the breathtaking, or the everyday miracles of life that I know, in theory, are around me. But with time, pondering, searching, patience, and practice, I have learned how to find it in any circumstance I may be in life.
The camera may every well be one of world’s most amazing inventions. It has become a tool for me, a third eye of enlightenment, you might say, to see blessings I have in my every day life, which I simply fail to see otherwise.
This has nothing to do with taking pictures for the sake of sharing them on social media to create the illusion for others that you have blessings. No, no. Don’t get caught up in that. There’s no joy or happiness there. I don’t share every single picture. I’d lose sight of why I take them. This is for me. This is to help me see that there are still beauties, and wonders, and everyday miracles in life, even amongst the troubled times we live in.
The camera has a way, for me, to open my mind and heart about what is beautiful by placing it in the perspective of a picture. A dandelion in my yard that I may normally look at with annoyance might suddenly take on a new perspective and depth of beauty I would not have normally considered once I have taken the time to zoom in on it’s finer details in the viewfinder of my lens and suddenly its a beautiful flower, not a nuisance.
So it is with the rest of my life. I normally find it all too easy to fail to find the beauty in day to day tasks and the all too familiar scenery of our home. We don’t have nice furniture, we don’t have the nicest clothes and our children do not look like Baby GAP models. We don’t have many things to put on our walls or to decorate our home with, or a decent family portrait to put up anywhere. It lacks a homey vibe, to say the least, not because we don’t try, but because our resources demand attention in other areas, like healthy wholesome food for our family, and all the other necessities of life which take priority over a nicely furnished home. Decor can wait. We are working towards becoming debt free and improving our lives in more important ways, that’s something to be thankful for right? It surely is, but it can often be hard to stay focused on the good when it’s tangibly hard to see and be reminded of visually.
There were times in my life that I couldn’t bring myself to capture memories in the making of my children playing and having fun and many of the first’s when they were babies simply because I every time I’d go to capture the moment, the imperfectness of the background of our home, the distractions of “imperfection” in the aethstetics of our home caused me to lower my camera almost every time and feel inadequate and think my life wasn’t so wonderful. I’d just think about how every time I’d look at those photos all I’d see is exactly what I see right now, a sad looking home, a complete lack of homeyness, and feeling of grey on the inside.
What a fool I was. There are so many moments I regret nothing capturing. I don’t how imperfect the photo would have turned out. The moments we have with our kids are short and fast fleeting. We cannot afford to let vanity take over even for a moment. One day we will look back and regret not filling our memory cards with more precious moments or our walls with collage upon collage of pictures of our precious babies.
These days I relish the opportunity to capture every moment with my family that I can. It’s something that I try to do for myself and for my kids to look back on one day or for those days when life feels harder than normal and I need a reminder of how good it really is and how temporary trials in life are. In the last several years I have become a life documenter, capturing the ins and ours of our family’s daily life in pictures and trying to be better about recording it in words.
The more I let go of trying to make everything “picture perfect” before I can allow myself to accept it as being beautiful, the more I can see the beauty in things I hadn’t even considered beautiful at all before. I see new perspectives on life often, a deeper and deeper insight into how wonderful life can be and, in turn, a greater desire and appreciate for it.
Life can be beautiful, no matter where we are in life. A favorite quote comes to mind, “What e’r tho art, act well thy part.” (An old Scottish proverb, requoted by Presidnet David O. McKay). For me, it softly whispers, “Be you, and be your best you. Live your life, life it to the fullest, and love your life.” My life doesn’t need to match anyone else’s in order to be beautiful. It is as beautiful as I make it and as beautiful as I see it.
