“A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living.” – Virginia Woolf I love seeing my son so excited to video chat with his grandparents.  🙂 Find more responses to the “Express Yourself” photo challenge here.
“The more you leave out, the more you highlight what you leave in.” ― Henry Green When my family looks back on my photos years from now, I want them to have a sense of what our lives looked and felt like at a moment in time.  What was important to us.  What made us happy.  In addition to the snapshots, I want my pictures to tell our family’s story. It’s not as easy as I imagined when I first set out with this goal.  Different pictures tell different stories.  Sometimes a great picture doesn’t tell the true story.  And sometimes I just miss the shot that tells the story. This photo curation of our family life is fulfilling and challenging and also a bit weighty in its responsibility for telling the story in an accurate way that ideally needs little to no explanation. I’m continually inspired by documentary-style family photographers who share personal stories from their families’ lives.  So I was happy to recently find the wonderful photographers over at The Sham of the Perfect, a blog …
“Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don’t resist them; that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.” ― Lao Tzu This week’s photo challenge was to show our interpretation of serenity.  Like parents everywhere, I find sweet comfort in watching my son sleep.  There’s something about seeing his relaxed, dreaming face that makes anything seem possible.
“There is a crack in everything.  That’s how the light gets in.” ― Leonard Cohen, Selected Poems, 1956-1968 This week’s photo challenge was to find the shadows.  See more responses to the shadow challenge here.
“Work more and better.  Keep hoping machine running.  Dream good.” – from Woody Guthrie’s 1942 New Year’s Resolution List I’m not much on New Year’s resolutions, but I do appreciate the symbolic beginning that the new year brings.  It’s a refreshing time to remember goals and make plans.  A few weeks ago, I wrote about boycotting my to-do list.  Now that the harried pace of the holidays are past, I’m much more energized to work on the personal projects on my to-do list.  I also learned something really helpful in a recent article on the psychology of the to-do list and what that nagging of our subconscious really means.  Apparently, the nagging has a name–the Zeigarnik effect–and new research is showing that instead of trying to get us to finish incomplete tasks, the nagging may be the brain’s way of telling us to just make a plan to finish those tasks. Maria Popova quotes the researcher’s nicely, “The persistence of distracting thoughts is not an indication that the unconscious is working to finish the task. Nor is it the unconscious nagging …
The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.” ― Dr. Seuss We try to limit screen time around our son, but it’s nice to let him have a little fun sometimes. Today he was learning how to use the mouse. Find more responses to this week’s challenge here.
The View Inside 