Near miss makes me think...

We had a bit of a catastrophe on Sunday morning. No lives were at risk. No humans or animals were hurt. But it caused me a bit of a personal crisis anyway. And I feel ....just selfish and spoiled.... for even thinking about it and dwelling on it. It's over and everything is fine now, but for a moment I was devastated. And I remind myself that things could have been much worse.

What happened? What could have caused me to be so introspective and desolée (sometimes only the French word expresses what I mean to say)? I left my camera outside Saturday afternoon. Then we went out for the evening. I was lucky in that our puppies (who eat everything) just left it lying in the grass where I'd set it to fix the kids' sprinkler. BUT...it rained Saturday night. It poured. I went outside to look at my garden Sunday morning and almost cried. Forget it. I did cry.

I opened it up and left it to dry and a few hours later, astonishingly it's fine. The lens might still be shot (but I didn't really like it anyway), but the camera with another lens works perfectly. Even if it hadn't been fine, I constantly remind myself that there are many worse things than losing a camera to one's own stupidity (isn't that the worst part though? it was my own fault)

And that brought me to some introspection. It was my husband's birthday. He wanted to go somewhere special and spend the day. I did too. Except that I wouldn't be able to take pictures. And if I couldn't take pictures, it's almost as if it didn't happen. There's no point in going and doing something special if I can't take pictures of it.

I haven't quite processed how I feel about what I was feeling in that moment. In some ways, it makes me want to just leave my camera at home. Maybe I'm so worried about taking pictures that I don't experience "the moment" the way I ought to be experiencing it. Or maybe the camera is just such a natural extension of me and the way I view the world that my identity is wrapped up in it. Wife, mother, sister, photographer.