PHOTOGRAPHY & CULTURE

“It’s neither good nor bad, it just is.”

Grand Central Station, New York City, New York
The Usual | Grand Central Station, New York City, NY | Nov 2008

Related
A photography project from 2007: In a New York Minute.

Unrelated
I used to think in extremes: good or bad, black or white, right or wrong.

I’ve always believed that everything in life is a choice, and that anything can be changed, no matter how good, bad, open, limited, difficult or easy the decision and changes are. We are who we are by doing what we do.

Classifying things into “good” and “bad” always provided me with a foundation towards making a decision.

But I’ve learned over time that there’s a lot of grey, and that life just isn’t that simple.

Instead of always focusing on what should be or could be, perhaps the greater opportunity is to recognize boundaries, accept what is and figure out ways to improve, modify or change that.


SIMILAR THOUGHTS
  • What did you learn from your first boss?
  • Shifting Gears
  • Influences, Quarterlife Crisis and More Unordered Thoughts
  • What happens when everybody is a videographer?
  • Interlude: Perspective, NYC


    • This entry was written by Taylor Davidson, posted on November 12, 2008 at 6:36, filed under Photography, Unstructured Thoughts and tagged , , . Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.

    Viewing 6 Comments

      • ^
      • v
      I used to think in binary too, but some years ago I came to a similar conclusion - that the world is full of blends and some colors show stronger that others, but they are all still mixed.

      When that happened I was able to use reason to better digest the world around me and not let different ideas bash into me like waves. Everything around us has more in common than most would like to see.
      • ^
      • v
      Absorb different ideas rather than deflect. How we choose to use different ideas is our choice, but if we don't listen we'll never learn.
      • ^
      • v
      In relation to my own choices, 'good' and 'bad' are words of morality, just like 'right', 'wrong' and 'should'. Outside that, something either works for me and what I'm committed to, or it doesn't, or somewhere in between.

      If "we are who we are by doing what we do" then we can change who we are by changing what we do. Stop going to the office and start surfing and you 'are' a surfer instead of an attorney. When you actually 'get' the possibilities for 'being' different things, life starts to look a lot longer. Who do you want to be today?
      • ^
      • v
      Change is a matter of defining priorities and making choices, as hard as they may be. I still believe we own our right to change ourselves; and we define that by our actions. We are what we do, as much as we may like that or not.

      I used to be a bit more strident in my positions in life; right was always right and wrong was always wrong as defined by my morality. But I've realized that multiple moralities exist: especially when compared across cultures, traditions and different times in history. I often wonder what conventions we hold as absolute will be either proved wrong or viewed very differently in the future: and if I've learned anything from history is that shifting moralities is not a possibility but a guarantee.
      • ^
      • v
      “Every time you make a choice, you are turning the control part of you into something a little different from what you were before. And taking your life as a whole, with all its innumerable choices, you are slowly turning the control thing either into a heavenly creature or into a hellish one.” – C. S. Lewis
      • ^
      • v
      At times I've lived beholden to my idea of my life, controlled by the world I've created.

      At other times I've lived with a little less control, regimen, schedule.

      Neither extreme has been good to me.

      Learning that it's ok to change my mind, that it's ok to be wrong, and that it's ok to be publicly wrong, has been great to me.

      (hard to go wrong with a C.S. Lewis quote, btw...)
     

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