Finding New Doors To Open And Things To Look Forward To

This pandemic year has seemingly robbed most of us of many things to which we had been looking forward. In my case they were trips and photo workshops planned and booked long in advance that were cancelled or postponed to another year. Now with the holidays fast approaching, there are the usual holiday family and friends gatherings that give us so many wonderful memories but, for this year will be greatly altered or non existent. It's hard to deal with such disappointments. It can even be depressing given that we don't have any clear cut idea of when we can resume what we used to think of as normal living. How do we deal with this? What can we do to help get us past these dismal times to when we can pick up normal lives again? I have thought often this year about the old quote "When God closes one door, He opens another." Well, I don't know if God is really the one opening another door, but I do know that if you want to find that other door, you have to be the one to look for it and to open it. Looking back over the last almost nine months, I have found countless new doors that I have opened, several of them that I never would have thought existed for me. A couple of them I found and knocked on not knowing if anyone would answer. And they didn't immediately. For example, I offered my services to the 2020 Census back in the spring, but I heard nothing from them until September. When that door finally opened, I discovered new things about myself that have since led me to other doors on which I am knocking. But as I have waited for answers to those knocks, I knew that I also had to continue to find things to excite me more immediately. So I have kept looking for more doors to open and to explore behind them. It has been amazing to see how people have managed to recreate how they normally do things. On-line webinars have sprouted up and become abundant in a multitude of creative fields. In photography alone I have been offered and have frequently taken both free and paid webinars at least monthly or more often, many in areas that I would have never considered before. Each time that I signed up for these Zoom meetings and added them to my calendar, I knew I had something for which to look forward. Some have been better than others, but I have always learned something new, something that peaked my interest and led me into a new and exciting direction, a new door. There are so many new doors out there for all of us. This trip down a hallway of doors is exhilarating if we let it be. I look forward to what is behind every day's door. What will I accomplish? What will I learn? And then there are those days already marked on my calendar to look forward to as well. I have signed up for four photography webinars the week-end after Thanksgiving. And what is really great is that, because they are webinars, they will be recorded and I can access them whenever I am free to do so. Not like the "old days" when if the class were on a day I was already busy, I would lose out. I will be visiting my son this next week. But I will have those webinars to look forward to along with so much more. Today's image is in preparation for my webinar class with Alan Shapiro on "Exploring the Power of Black and White," scheduled for next Saturday. But if I am busy doing things with my son, I will still have it to look forward to.