By l.D. Kirlin
The other day I came across a photo album filled with pictures of my niece and nephews. The pictures took me back to when they were born and walked me through the years of their young lives. It was an interesting find because my oldest nephew had a birthday coming up that week and to see the pictures of his very first day in the world was a shocking reminder of how quickly life moves. I remember when I could entertain him for hours with an empty Tic Tac container and a penny. Now my nephew is a diesel mechanic who entertains himself by fixing and figuring out anything put in front of him. What a difference twenty-nine years makes!
TWENTY-NINE years … It is nearly impossible to wrap my mind around that number. I like to remind myself that I was just a teenager when my nephew was born, however, math is math. If you add 29 years to my teenage years, it all adds up to a good bit of seasoning for me…and it shows. I’m starting to hear a lot more phrases like, “When I was a kid”, and “back in my day” … and they are coming from me! There was a point when I declared that would never happen; never say never!
As I paged through the album, I smiled at how cute the kids were (they still are) and laughed as I remembered funny things they said and did. Of course, it wasn’t long before I started remembering other things that happened during those years as well. The fact is, Memory Lane can be a tricky path to navigate, because it’s not just the comical recollections that pave the road. The potholes of hardships and heartaches exist there as well, and I found some deep ones.
I started thinking about tough situations during those points in my life. I recalled deep-seated dreams I had for my future, problems I was dealing with, and problems I was avoiding. Before I knew it, I began wishing for a way to go back and handle some of those things differently. In the blink of an eye, I went from traveling on Cute Kids highway to speeding down “If Only” Boulevard before nearly crashing on “What If” Avenue. It didn’t take long after that for me to pull myself over and give myself a lecture and a ticket!
There is a song I remember from my younger days titled “Which Five Years”. The song, penned by Craig Michael Wiseman and Lisa Drew, and performed by Pam Tillis, deals with the topics of aging and regret. As I sat there making a mental list of the experiences I would go back to avoid if I could, and the situations I would handle differently, the lyrics of that song came flooding to me. Suddenly, I realized that so many of my current blessings stem from the difficult lessons I’ve learned over the years. To alter anything in the past would change the present, and, though life isn’t perfect, there are people and things in it now that I wouldn’t trade for anything.
While I appreciate all the lyrics in that song, the one line that kept repeating in my ‘photographer’s mind was,
“There’s just no way you can edit the shadow from the shine.”
As a photographer, editing is something that I do when conditions warrant it. When the lighting isn’t quite right or the lens doesn’t quite capture what I see, I adjust the levels to compensate. Every now and then I need to remove unwanted objects in the background of a picture because they distract the eye from the main subject of the photograph. While modern technology makes this easier, there are some instances where I simply cannot make edits without ruining the composition of the image. There is just no way I can edit the shadow from the shine…there is no way to separate the good from the bad … and that is life.
The fact is it’s easy to look back on the past and wish it was different, but it takes a lot of courage to own our mistakes and apply the lessons we’ve learned from them. To remove them from the past would just mean we have to learn those lessons now. I don’t know about you, but I would rather have wisdom from getting through the struggles than the struggles themselves!
Though some days and weeks might seem endless because of the difficulties in them, the years are short and compound quickly. Good and bad, joys and struggles all add up to life. While Memory Lane is a nice place to visit, it’s best not to overstay our welcome there. Whether it’s twenty-nine years or twenty-nine seconds, we can’t go back and change anything. We can, however, appreciate each day we are given for the gift that it is – after all, it’s called the present for a reason.
…never underestimate the power of perspective.
