This is one of my all-time favourite photos, and a nice balm after all those snow storm photos I had just posted. It’s colourful, it’s summer, and the sun is shining.
This is/was an old run-down pier in Nelson, BC, which I’m sure has had to have been ripped down by now. It jutted right over the water, and was totally sketchy to walk on to get this photo, but there weren’t any barriers to do so. Everything is so over-safetied (there’s got to be an actual word for that), it’s harder and harder to find pockets of things where you can even do stuff like this.
I think many people now – especially that the pandemic is reaching two years – are so scared of everything. Scared of getting hurt, scared of others getting hurt. Sometimes you have to get hurt, or sick. You have to learn the real boundaries so you can know what’s really unsafe and not just perceived unsafe. Those two can be very different things.
I’m a person that doesn’t like ambiguity, so I get the impulse of stepping back and going “I don’t know about this.” But I’m also a person that will walk out on that old rusty beam to get a good shot. We all need to take a little collective breath sometimes and re-assess what’s unsafe and what’s just kind of uncomfortable, because the two really aren’t the same thing.