The teenage philosopher Ferris Bueller once said: “Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” In the nearly 40 years that have passed since Ferris took a day off to appreciate the fleeting innocence of high school, life has only moved faster. And we look around less.
The great irony is that we’re supposed to have more free time than ever. Each technological advance promises to make our lives easier and give us the freedom to enjoy life. But we don’t gain freedom. We’re expected to be even more productive.
Before I could even start writing this essay, I had to close a box in Microsoft Word that offered to write this post for me. Had I accepted its invitation, I would have “saved” a couple of hours. I would have also been deemed a lazy loser if I had wasted those hours staring out the window. But maybe we should stare out the window every once in a while.
Producing is more than looking busy. Making discoveries is productive. And we can’t discover if we can’t wander.
Had AI written this post for me, it would have put words in a new order, but it wouldn’t have offered any new thoughts. Its production is a matter of repackaging what’s been done before.
Some 5 billion photos are taken each day. How many of those are truly unique? Viewpoints are crowded with people aiming to take the same picture. In more remote areas, people hire photo guides to help them recreate the images they saw online. They may get dramatic pictures, but they aren’t likely to get their own experiences.
Discovery involves risk — the risk that you waste time on a road that leads nowhere. I think the bigger waste results from being afraid to go somewhere new. While I’m speaking of photography in this post, the same could be said of any profession or activity where you go through the motions instead of giving yourself time to think about what you’re doing.
My new exhibit is called Seeing Slowly, and it’s an extension of my Five Minutes in Nature project. Like the earlier work, it’s an invitation to get beyond the first draft world we inhabit. The pieces show the surprises that await if you are mindful about trying to connect with the environment around you. But they also show what you can miss if you don’t.
This is perhaps easiest to see in the waterfalls that are featured in the exhibit. Both are ephemeral. One, in Yosemite, lights up for only a few days a year, and it doesn’t flow every year. The other, in Glacier National Park, flows for only a couple weeks a year.
They are undoubtedly worth seeing, but if you only ventured out if you were guaranteed to see them in their prime, you would never go. They’re a reminder that if you don’t stop and look around once in a while, there’s a lot you can miss.
Seeing Slowly will be on view at Gallery Belltown in Seattle from January 16-March 16. Contact me for a private viewing.
(Kevin’s book, Five Minutes in Nature, collects images and stories about his experiences in the wilderness, curated to help you have deeper encounters of your own. Preview and order it here. Prints of his images are available through LivingWilderness.com. Learn about new work by joining his mailing list.)
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