Pushing Water Uphill

People are just so complicated! Life is just so complicated, at the moment every direction I turn to just seems so very complicated!!! Don’t get me wrong, there are areas that are less overwhelming than others, but don’t let this apparently coherent façade fool you into believing that my life is smooth at the moment! (I haven’t got time to highlight the issues, and if I’m honest if I get started, it won’t be fair to my mother in law).

Yes, yes, I know I should practice what I preach, (to students anyway) and time manage myself effectively, (which I am doing with work related topics I add, just in case my boss ever reads this), but people and those relationships, are such a different ball game! And family...Man don’t get me started, pushing water uphill is easer!

My mind tends to work best when it can focus on the task at hand, but in our fast changing lives, there are just so many things to occupy our waking hours! (can you believe it, I’ve come to the library to give myself some distraction free time for writing this and the Liberian has just asked me to fill in a customer satisfaction survey...man o live!)

Anyway, I have a million and one things I would really like to get around to doing, (Work, family, me), but sadly the list of tasks that are directed towards myself, the ones that will develop my creativity seem to always be pushed further and further into the distance. Don’t get me wrong, I know it’s my own fault for packing in too much, for choosing to say yes to so many things, for having a truly optimistic attitude to new and exciting things. Again don’t misunderstand me, there are some really exciting things happening to my photographic development, that I will be announcing soon, but I’m suffering now, I have overload! Sadly some things have to be pushed further into the distance! But I find it so very hard to do!

Creativity has suffered lately. It is very important to me, it offers me some space to develop, to ponder, to reflect, to slow down and actually, “create”. I personally would argue that it is a deep need to maintain our healthy physiological balance. But, postponing many creative activity’s for me anyway has a negative effect on the way I operate. It dampening my enthusiasm, wears down my optimism, puts a dampener on me, affecting all those other ‘necessary’ areas of my life. It would see selfish to ‘waste’ time on creating, if you have no food, no shelter, no security (Maslow hierarchy of needs), but to be honest the lucky ones of us that live in the western world, this is taken for granted for the vast majority of us.

Photography (be it, planning, thinking, writing, editing, or in the field) satisfies that creative urge. With my busy live it acts as a paradoxical escapist development. It offers me the opportunity to inhabit a creative space; it offers me somewhere to slow down, somewhere to ponder the subtler things, somewhere to be me. I just now have to find a way of being me with the rest of my life!