As I scrolled through the photos I took last week in Grand Teton National Park, I was frustrated with my rookie wildlife photography skills. Our photo group was lucky to see grizzlies every day. And about half of my photographs show these bears in all their blurred-face glory. Another batch shows finely detailed blades of tall grass with brown blobs behind. I wasn’t interest in photos of grass, as lovely as it was.
I had to step away from my photo review for a moment and take a deep breath. I am on this road trip to see new things, to learn, to meet people outside of my bubble. I slowly came to the realization that blurry bears are a good thing (they were awfully cute…really)! Blurry bears are telling me that I am stretching myself, pushing past my day-to-day experiences.
This realization isn’t simply a justification for my ratio of nine blurry photos for every good one (can the bears stop moving please and rise up from the tall grass?). It’s a reminder to refocus on my original goal for this trip. I have a circumscribed area of expertise and practice…things that I am familiar with and that I do well; I want to move out of this small area of comfort and self-satisfaction into unknown territory to try new things, to gain new expertise, and discover new joys. And it’s not that I am unhappy with what I know and what I do. I just think we all need a refresh, particularly as we get older.
Clarification of my goal, for this road trip and for my life, came a week before I left home in late August. A dear friend was thinking about joining a new synagogue and I went to shabbat services with her to check things out. The prayerbook was the kind I love…filled with notes in the margins about different interpretations of the scripture, explanations of how a prayer became part of the traditional service over hundreds of years, even suggested alternative and modern readings. And it just popped up at me…a notation below the prayer text that said (and I am paraphrasing here), “This prayer is about making the world new again, young again, not about making us young again. We have power over what we do in the world, not our aging.”
This struck me as brilliant. If the world is young again it is new and fresh for me, it is ever changing. This seems so sensible and so magical to me… like a fountain of life. It seems pointless to wish or ask that I stay young. But keeping the world young around me? This is something in my control. This is a magic I can pull off. And it is indescribably exciting.
This brings me back to those damn blurry bears. The world around me was young when I spent last week taking wildlife photos for the first time. I had a new lens, a new tripod, and a new remote for my camera. Perhaps the world was a bit “too young” and I should have nailed down a few more variables before venturing out to Grand Teton NP but it was exciting (and yes frustrating) and wonderfully satisfying to be learning new things and to get a few shots of bears that looked like bears. And I laughed with a wonderful group of people and had a magical time lapse moment that is still with me.
The world around me was young when I asked that group of bikers at a general store in West Virginia about recommendations for good scenic drives and we talked for 30 minutes about the best roads for scenery and driving pleasure but also about the wonders of classic design (the Blue Car and Harley Davidsons) and even about parenting (empty nester status).
The world around me was young when I went to a David Kushner concert in Minneapolis on a total whim and I was one of about 20 people over the age of 30 in a room of hundreds. I loved the concert and had a great conversation with a woman who had brought her daughter to the show. And I realized I really should have cooler shoes if I want to hang with that kind of crowd again.
The list could go on but in fact, the world is young around me every day on this trip. It’s an easier thing to do and maintain while traveling but in truth, it’s less about a physical place and more about a mind space. I believe the key to a vibrant and interesting life and yes, to aging well, is to constantly step outside that circumscribed area of experiences and knowledge to test oneself, to learn new things, to be comfortable being crappy at something for a while and then, if I like what I am doing, to keep at it. To embrace the fun and the newness of it and perhaps get better. Maybe even have expertise in some totally new things some day. This is what we do when we are children…all the time. I can’t count the number of times I reminded my kids that they were trying something new and not to be frustrated…telling them they shouldn’t expect to be good at something on the first try. That they had to keep at it. So true with my grizzlies.
So enjoy one of my rare photos of (mostly) un-blurry bears. I am confident that if I keep at wildlife photography there will be more and more crisp photos and fewer blurry ones. And I will keep at it because I love it. It’s a whole new world opened up to me and I do enjoy sitting in the sage grass in the late afternoon waiting for hours for that lazy bull moose to get up from his nap so I can practice my skills, laugh with friends, and marvel at the miracle that is our world.
Susan Silberberg, mile 196,487
