Letting go of the convention that the words I write must have something to do with the photographs I share is liberating. The connection between the pictures I’m taking and the thoughts I’m having is often not readily apparent to me. I understand that this uncertainty is essential to my growth and I just accept that things don’t make sense right away. I’m sharing photographs from the botanical gardens where I completely lost track of time—and excerpts from a really good read where I had to press on with intention.
I finally finished Sean Tucker’s book, The Meaning in the Making, and I am so glad I stuck with it. I got a little bogged down with the chapters Critique and Feel and almost set the book aside. I have a bad habit of starting creative self-help books and not finishing them. I wonder if this is some form of self-sabotage or maybe it’s self-preservation.
Sean’s last chapter, Time, outlined a framework for our creative journeys, based on the work of Carl Jung. Using the analogy of a day split in half by the noonday sun, he describes the progression of our human lives as morning, noon, and afternoon. The chapter is well worth the read if you have the chance. I easily identified the noon of my journey, triggered by the crisis of having to move my mother into a nursing home and the anguish I felt over the loss of love from my siblings when I made that hard decision. This was a singular event for me when my need to please everyone ran headlong into my need to do what was safest for my mother, despite the fallout.
When I reached the paragraph on what the “afternoon” looks like, I felt a great sense of relief because this is exactly where I am.
Well, Jung summed it up like this: “The first half of life is devoted to forming a healthy ego, the second half is going inward and letting go of it.” He also suggested that in the afternoon we begin to focus more on the things that count, like the people in our lives and the state of the world at large. Our spirituality expands and becomes more inclusive and less rigid. We become less interested in polarizing politics and have a more flexible view of the future. We’re more open and less insistent about finding neat or simplistic answers to life. We start to let go of our compulsion for control, and we begin to accept where our influence begins and ends. We start to make friends with uncertainty and paradox.
We also simplify our lives, eliminating all the showy things we’ve accumulated that were designed to shout about the person we were trying to project into the world . . . we pare down our lives to invest more deliberately in the good stuff we’ve identified.
Sean was quick to point out that reaching the afternoon of our journey doesn’t make us any better than anyone else. . . and it’s possible to make work of great depth and beauty at any stage of development, so concentrate on running your own race and making the very best work you can.
I’ve seen a counselor ever since that noonday event in my life, and my only regret is not seeking help sooner. I can look back at my photography and see the changes and growth based on my self-awareness, and I’m better for the discovery and the work.