Collecting Moments And Learning To Appreciate Mistakes

Life is a collection of consecutive moments that we forge into reality as they are given. We began creating our today from bits and pieces of all the previous yesterdays. Each moment is a patchwork of successes and mistakes that form the thread we weave tomorrow with. It’s not really matter of if we fail but when. More importantly is how we use that failure in creating our future. We can build a wall of mistakes that imprison our own spirits in an impenetrable fortress of “I Can’t” or, we can use those same errant blocks to build a stairway that takes us beyond our previous limits. It all depends on how you arrange your mistakes. Today I was looking through my archive for some specific images to present to a client as potential book covers and the deeper into the past I got the more I cringed at what I had chosen to archive. A lot of images were over processed and there was virtually no control over lighting. Some of the images had such a poor flow that it was hard to tell what the subject was. And yet the overall pattern shows that I have built on my mistakes by learning from them. And I am more than certain that there will be more building blocks in the future.

When I look at tonight’s feature image of the Snowberry Clearwing Moth feeding on the chicory bloom I see life in motion. A moment of time suspended that carries all my previous moments that built up to the point when my eye and lens moved in sync with the moments of the moth’s life. It is as much a collection of lessons learned as it is a collection of successes.

I suppose that in conclusion of tonight’s post I simply wanted to encourage you to never allow a failure to hold you back on anything you try. Life is an expiriment in trial and error and the errors are not a stopping point. They’re just a way to find what does work.