Okay, so it’s been a while. So long, in fact, that when I now tell someone that I blog, my eyes do this weird shifty thing and my feet shuffle nervously. It takes an astounding reserve of willpower to avoid crossing my fingers behind my back. But as I sit, digits poised and ready to regain my claim to the title ‘blogger’, I’ve found that the topic I sat down to write about has taken a back seat, and my attention has digressed on a tangent not entirely unrelated.
When I sat down to write this post, the intention was to write about recent occurences in my life. They have brought some changes and excitement, new hobbies and interests have been found, incredible people met, risks taken; but as I sit here at my desk, what strikes me the most about it is how inextricably linked each tiny nugget of experience is with those that surround it. How is it possible to capture the reality of that space of time without including every moment that influenced it? Life is moments. It’s one big, long moment. It’s many, many smaller ones; each one subtly influencing how we interpret moments that have passed and moments still to come.
There’s three main pieces of news, each of which deserve to have their own post, so for now a brief summary will suffice to illustrate my point.
- I worked on a film-set
- I bought my first DSLR
- I travelled to Wales
Take the first. Exciting, no? But how did it come about. A thoughtless silence-filling sentence dropped into an awkward conversation months ago. A series of unconnected events later, a phone rings and an opportunity awaits. A single moment that, like the proverbial butterfly, caused ripples with consequences. Through my experience of working on set, another conversation, somewhat less awkward and yet equally consequential, led me to a moment where I realised that now was the time to take the plunge and invest in a decent camera. But how distinguishable was that point of realisation from the thousands of other fleeting, seemingly meaningless moments that preceeded it? Can that eureka moment be solely attributed to that particular time and place, or is it simply the end result of a series of subconsciously connected thoughts and events that combine to put into place the final piece of the puzzle, and reveal the complete picture; the conclusion of a thought process founded in another moment, at another time.
Each of the events of the last month are bound together, related and tangled through a complex web of thoughts and chance occurences, but this post has ceased to be about recent events. It’s about the transient nature and interconnectedness of experience; those isolated seconds that take on an anomalous and peculiar sense of poignancy, whether from personal significance, inherent beauty, or simply and inexplicably because they do. Each one is a moment like none passed, existing only in the present, never to be recreated, and affecting us and others in an entirely unpredictable manner.
Ravolution 