I recently read of a 19-year-old football player, a goalkeeper for Real Madrid, who was in a serious car accident and left unable to walk for two years. The story caught my attention because it was 14 years ago this month that I had my own accident, which shattered both my feet, cracked my pelvis, and left me unable to walk with a long road back to normal.
Life, they say, is what happens when you’re busy making other plans. “Sh!t Happens,” says the bumper sticker a bit more succinctly. Indeed.
Like the 19-year-old footballer’s accident, my fall in Italy didn’t just shatter my feet, but my plans and dreams. At the time, it felt like a heartbreaking detour.
But it wasn’t a detour at all. A detour takes you from your planned path, diverts you for a while, and then plunks you down further up the road. You use more fuel and might feel lost for a moment or two, but then you’re back on track. Chances are, it won’t make that much of a difference.
What happened to me in Italy didn’t just give me an alternate route to wherever I thought I was heading; it took me in an entirely new direction. It didn’t feel that way at the time—it didn’t even feel like a detour, but an impassable roadblock.
I bet it felt like that to the young footballer, too. His name is Julio Iglesias. The name is probably familiar to you, though you might not know him as an athlete. The accident happened a long time ago; Iglesias is now 81 years old. He is one of the world’s most beloved and commercially successful Spanish singers, not to mention one of the best-selling musicians of all time. During his two-year recovery, one of his nurses gave him a guitar, and he discovered his gift for music. His accident wasn’t a detour. And it wasn’t a roadblock. It was a redirection.
If you’ve ever used GPS navigation in your car, you know the chastising tone of voice your navigation uses when you take a wrong turn. “Recalculating,” it repeats until it finds a way to re-route you. I can’t be the only one who hears it saying “dumbass”in the pauses in between.
If you listen carefully, that’s the constant refrain of the creative life: “Recalculating…Recalculating…”
The challenge is not “getting back on track.” It’s not avoiding the mistakes and missteps that take us off at the wrong exit. The challenge is to hear in that one-word mantra (recalculating…) not judgment but possibility. It’s to hear an invitation in the pauses in between. Heard with an open mind, it’s a call to adventure.
In my home airport, Vancouver International, there is a quote on the wall that reminds travellers that “it’s not the destination that counts, but the journey,” which always makes me laugh because if there’s one time in life the destination really does matter, it’s air travel. The destination is the whole point!
In the creative life, there is no destination. It’s not that it’s less important; it simply doesn’t exist. There is no place where one arrives, collects their luggage, and tosses their boarding passes in the bin on the way out of the airport, the journey now complete.
The creative life is only journey.
It is always recalculating.
This isn’t positive thinking; it’s creative thinking, and it’s important if we’re going to approach our work with less rigidity and find greater joy in it. It’s absolutely necessary if we’re going to make work that isn’t safe.
And, pragmatically, it’s helpful when you’re trying to create your work in the real world when light and circumstances don’t always go to plan. When you’re in the field and one of your lenses fails, forcing you to completely reconsider your entire approach. When you’re working on a body of work that you thought was going in one direction but takes a right turn at Albuquerque (Bugs Bunny fans will get the reference). Or when you’re photographing a scene and it’s just not working, or that moment you’ve waited so long for materializes differently than you planned.
Do you bang your head against these circumstances, maybe use them as excuses, or (to return to my metaphor) do you take the off-ramp and see where it leads?
Sometimes, all I’ve had to do is turn around (recalculating, recalculating) and point my camera at something else.
In hindsight, the best of my work has often resulted from the unexpected or the accidental. What initially appeared to be a roadblock was, in fact, an invitation to recalculate.
Better minds than mine have observed that “what’s in the way is the way.” Whether it’s a roadblock or an off-ramp to something better is up to you.
I’ve never found that my work (or my life) goes very well when I’m unbending and inflexible, when I adopt a stance of rigidity and stand my ground instead of embracing a spirit of openness and exploration. Trying stubbornly to bash my creative square peg into the round hole of circumstance has never been anything but exhausting, and I don’t do my best work when my tank is empty. None of us do.
Stay open. The creative life is one of endless recalculations, and not only can nothing divert you if there’s no ultimate destination, but it’s the zig-zags that make the most interesting journeys.
For the Love of the Photograph,
David
PS – I’ll be in Vancouver doing a free evening presentation at the theatre at Langara College on May 30. The event is free, thanks to Sony Canada and Kerrisdale Cameras. For all the details and to reserve your spot: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/light-space-and-time-an-evening-with-david-duchemin-tickets-1337180766669
The biggest challenges for most photographers are not technical but creative. They are not so much what goes on in the camera but what goes on in the mind of the person wielding it. Light, Space & Time is a book about thinking and feeling your way through making photographs that are not only good, but truly your own. It would make an amazing gift for the photographer in your life, especially if that’s you. Find out more on Amazon.
