Comfort Zones and the Big Chill
Monday, May 4th 2009 @ 5:38 PM (not yet rated)
There was an aphorism back in the days of my wild and abandoned youth, "You are either moving forward or falling backwards; there is no such thing as standing still." I whole-heartedly agreed with that statement at the time I first heard it. Ah, youth and stupidity! What a wonderful combination! It was so obvious that you either moved forward or sat on the porch waiting for the Big Chill. I didn't realize just what a hold a life's moments can place on us.
Yet as I keep finding anew, the saying is still so true. You can move forward, you can fall back, but you cannot stay in one place. It's not an option, it's not a choice, it doesn't exist. Now, with a few more years behind me, I of course HATE this truth of life. Hate it for what it seems to make happen ... leaving wonderful times and people behind, making me seem to choose to walk away from things and people I have loved. Hate it for destroying what seems each time a well-earned comfort zone.
The whole world of digital imagery changes just as fast as life, and just as relentlessly. I could maintain a large and well-tended comfort zone in the time of film, and expected that after the first "blast" into digital I could create the same safe home. Au contraire ...
Digital tools and techniques are so continuously changing, and so challenging. The learning curve has been mentioned around here before, and we'll mention it again. My job, our job, is to learn ahead of you and assist you in your own path through the minefields and quagmires of the gear and the software. And we'll also try to (metaphorically) hold your hands through the inner terrors that come from this constant challenge. Digital imaging is perhaps one of the most obvious fields of endeavor where that adage of moving forward or falling behind rules supreme.
But hating that old rule doesn't make it untrue, nor make it go away. Nor make it possible to hang on to anything anyway. Every time I try to get around it, IT just sits there staring at me, watching me start sliding backwards. All too soon my comfort zone disappears, and I struggle to regain the acceptance of this un-defeatable Truth, and work at re-joining the time of now.
Until, of course, a wonderful new comfort zone has sprung up around me. I would think that at some point in life, I would simply adapt to this truth permanently, but re-grasping it seems harder and harder all the time.
That's where being around "live" folks, even in places online like here, can be of such help. We have to keep moving, changing, and growing because in the world of the modern 'net, EVERYTHING is constantly moving, changing, and growing. And simply sitting around waiting for the Big Chill is so boring anyway.
You help me keep moving forward, and I'll promise to do the same for you. Deal?
