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 An Accelerating Possibility Curve It’s 8am in the middle of the Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge. I’ve been photographing snow geese since long before dawn. Thousands stop here on their yearly migration and, until an hour ago, the morning sky had been crowded with them. Now, however, the sky was empty. “They’ll bed down right after dawn and won’t get up for anything after that,” the Ranger had told me, “About the only thing that frightens them once they’re down is a low flying plane and we don’t get many of those around here.” Well, they were sure “down” now. I could hear them all squawking (talking?) somewhere over the corn rows in front of me. A good bit of hiking and I found them, thousands of I set up my long lens and waited. An hour. Not one flew. Another hour. Nope, they certainly were “down”. In the heat of the morning, my mind began to wander. Strangely, looking at that empty sky and the immovable snow geese, I found myself thinking about the nature of change. In so many areas of our lives, we simply don’t want it. None of us want to get older, or face a new onslaught of IRS regulations, or like having our favorite TV series dumped unceremoniously from the airways. But in photography? Oh, there I worship change! Right now, if I thought it would help, I’d get down on my knees and beg for these snow geese to take flight. It’s not the status quo that makes good photography, it’s change. How many times have I prayed for the weather to shift, for an eyebrow to raise, for light to become a little more golden? More times than I can count. If I see its’ value so clearly in my photography, why does it frighten me so much in the rest of my life? As my musing continued, I began to see that this awesome change curve we hear so much about, this phenomenal rate of change in today’s society -- was really my ally. In fact, if I viewed it from just a slightly different perspective, it wasn’t a change curve at all... it was a possibility curve. A possibility curve? Could I see it like that? I knew from my photography that it was true. Change is possibility, and the times of most change always hold the most potential. So why do I dig my heels in so much when things around me start to change? If I did that in my photography, I’d take only one picture... over and over and over again. I believe we do live in a Possibility Curve, and it’s accelerating. The earth today is like a landscape of turbulent weather or a sky with 10,000 snow geese. Viewed as change, it threatens to overwhelm us. Viewed as possibility... now that’s a lot nicer frame, a lot more exciting vision. Perhaps we can’t control it, but we can learn to ride it... like a rapids on a great river. To take advantage of the flow and use it to take us where we want to go. To live in uncertainty and yet act with confidence. An accelerating Possibility Curve. To me it was just an extension of “More Than One Right Answer”. 100 years ago Charles Darwin wrote, “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change” (see Basic Jones 10/98). Today he might have penned, “the ones who have learned to embrace and utilize the Possibility Curve” Far in the distance, I heard the sound of a motor. I was still musing, “Photography is a great teacher. What a collection of metaphors and lessons. A Possibility Curve. I was definitely going to think some more about this one”. The sound of the motor grew louder finally penetrating my reverie. A plane! I barely had time to get my eye to the lens before the snow geese heard it too. A ripple of excitement spread out across the pond. Change...eh, Possibility was in the air. Whoosh! Ten thousand wings beat the air at the same moment. The landscape was changing faster than my motor drive could comprehend. And I was right in the middle of it, clicking like mad, riding that ever accelerating Possibility Curve! © Dewitt Jones Productions, 2001 |
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them, in a tiny lake in the middle of the reserve.