The Big Picture

I love macro shots. It's like a game, finding the "hidden" shots within the larger landscape. It's just fun to look at pictures on a bigger screen afterward and find that the camera captured some cool detail I hadn't even noticed at the time.

But, in the spirit of regularly trying things outside my comfort zone, I picked a wide angle, landscape shot for this week's photo. It's not what I would consider my overall best shot from this past week, but it helps me make a point. :)

This weekend I was up in the mountains. All of a sudden, the world back-pedaled from early Spring to middle-of-Winter, and got all full of snow to boot. Now, I'm not a snow person. I didn't even see snow until I was in high-school, and it wasn't until college that I saw enough of it in one place to allow for anything like, say, skiing. People say the best part of skiing is getting back to the cabin and hitting the hot tub after a day's worth of plummeting towards one's doom gliding down the mountain. Yes, I've taken downhill skiing lessons, and I've gone cross-country skiing. But really I prefer to skip the skiing bit and going straight for the hot tub along with a pot of tea. :)

Given that background, one might imagine how easy it is for me to end up grumbling about the cold, about how slippery the ground is, and how it was Spring 8 hours ago. And since I often end up doing some of that (hopefully more in my head than aloud), it's good to put things into perspective...

We spend so much of our lives in the details. The chilly wind, the left boot that doesn't quite fit, the snow that is now melting inside the right one, the water bottle that is now about half an hour's walk away in the car, the dirt on the glasses that the glare from the sun now makes obvious, and wouldn't it be nice if we'd brought along a map?

Yet, zoom out even just a bit in the grand scheme of things, and all of that disappears. We now have a sunny, snow-covered landscape with beautiful tall trees. Oh, yea, and a hiker, off to the side.

Looking past the at-the-time-annoying-but-really-insignificant details, I had a great time snow-shoeing with a bunch of fantastic friends among some amazing scenery. Although I can easily see myself remembering the afternoon as "time I could have spent in a hot tub drinking tea", the memory is, ironically, warm and happy. I guess I really ought to know from years of dancing that it's important to look up from your own feet. :)

Not to say that details aren't important. They often are crucial. But details without a frame of reference are mostly useless, and it's amazingly difficult to get caught up with the unimportant ones while completely ignoring the important ones.

So, what do you see, when you look at your own experiences from a distance?