The world goes from a path to be walked to an artwork waiting to be discovered.
Since I was a kid, I've been interested in photography. My dad got me into it by accidentally making me envious of his new camera and letting me buy it off him at a discount. It was an old point and shoot, a Canon Ixus. That little thing ended up getting me my first ever Explore front page on Flickr when my dad took me to the local lakes at sunset and helped me get down the embankment without dying. It's still one of my favourite photos and you can see it below.
After that, he bought me a Canon DSLR for my eleventh birthday and in the last 5-odd years I've been using Olympus OM-D cameras. In the time that I've been interested in photography, my enthusiasm has fluctuated, but the eye has remained. The photographer’s eye.
It's strange, after a few minutes of deciding to commit to taking photos, you end up looking at the world in a 4x3 frame (or whatever ratio you work at). You don't just look at a building, you see the reflections bouncing off, the lines cutting through, the shadows flickering across. The world goes from a path to be walked to an artwork waiting to be discovered.
It's such a wonderful way to look at the world. Sometimes it takes you away from the experience, yes, but I think mostly it forces you to appreciate the world in a way that normal life simply cannot do.
It's not so much a fresh perspective, which is more about understanding something in a new way. Instead, it really is like a fresh pair of eyes to shift how you view the whole world. And yes, you could argue that there's a lot of similarity between the two, but if I did that, I wouldn't be able to claim that this post is different to the one I posted a couple of weeks ago, so please do me a favour and consider the two to be similar but separate concepts.
If you're still here, I'll assume you did that and I thank you for it.
Anyway, the reason this all came to mind is that I watched yet another Beau Miles video. What a guy. Oh I love him. He heard about an old place getting knocked down and asked if he could have a few days to take as much wood as he could.
Those conservationist eyes of his ended up getting him about AU$15,000 worth of timber, but that wasn't the point. If it was, I would have said “those opportunistic eyes of his”. But I didn't. I said conservationist. He is able to view dying things and see that they are only dying in one way, that they still have a different life available to them if we only spend the time and effort to grant them that gift.
I also question why we have used efficiency to do more instead of taking less time to do the same amount
And again, I chose my words carefully there. I'd usually say “take the time and effort”, but I think in a situation like this, the time isn't stolen, it is given freely and something wonderful is received in return.
As he points out in the video: “What's taken me about 10 hours will probably take an excavator about 15 minutes. And that is the crude modern world. We are wonderful at time management, humans. Makes perfect sense. We'll do remarkable things with an excavator, but it will also ruin a lot of the timber.”
I wonder what impact the choice to see the world through the disposer’s eyes has on both planet and people.
I also question why we have used efficiency to do more instead of taking less time to do the same amount, although I admit that question is laced with a certain amount of privilege.
Perhaps an admirable goal is to learn how to adopt as many eyes as possible.
One of the ones I've recently started embedding in my life is about learning. I've had challenges recently and the decision to adopt a learner's eye has turned this whole experience into something much more positive, although I must admit that I sometimes view things from a victim's perspective instead. That's okay, progress is rarely linear.
I find it interesting how switching “eyes” can have such a tangible impact. I'm proud to be a part of the gender equality committee at work and, as a sub-group of that, I'm the co-chair of the men's group. Being the co-chair has certainly influenced how I act: if I want the group to be open, inclusive and progressive, I have to do my best to demonstrate those same behaviours.
And when issues are discussed in our gender equality committee, I often put my men's group hat on. When we talk about the gender pay gap (apologies to my non-binary friends for this paragraph, the pay gap debate is currently very binary), it's not just that women aren't in certain areas, it's also that men aren't either. For example, we have to get more women into construction and we have to get more men into customer experience.
If equality is going to be achieved, men have to be confident taking up roles that aren't about control and are about serving others. Until men are fully comfortable doing this and not worried about looking like less of a “man”, then we're stopping men from having the opportunity to be themselves and we're stopping women from having the opportunity to enter typically male workspaces. That's not an original thought, but it is new to me since looking through the co-chair-of-our-men's-group lens.
I'm intrigued to discover which eyes I will learn to see the world through next and how that will impact myself and those around me.
Happy voluntravelling,
The Voluntraveller
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