When I’m out around town or travelling and I see something that I find beauty in, I — naturally — want to take a picture of it. I pull my phone out of my pocket, find a great angle and I snap away — fully expecting to have a masterpiece to post on social media or to, at some point, frame and hang on my wall.
More often than not, I get home, look at the pictures, and realize they came out horrible. I could run into Big Foot, see a UFO, take a selfie with Barack Obama, and discover dinosaur bones, all in the same day, and every single picture would be unrecognizable. For years, I was convinced that I was horrible at taking pictures.
It’s not that I’m horribly bad at actually framing the picture or anything like that — I actually do a descent job at that. The most common problem I run into is that my pictures come out blurry. Not shaky hand blurry though. See, I either keep my phone in my pocket or my hands most of the time. If my phone is in my pocket, there’s a good chance my hands are also going into my pockets frequently. When my hands are in my pockets, I’m often touching whatever else is in my pockets — including my phone.
So like I said, I was convinced for a long time, that I was horrible at taking pictures. Turns out, the biggest issue with my pictures is that, sometimes my lens is just dirty. After missing out on getting pictures of so many wonderful moments, I finally realized that I wasn’t bad at taking pictures, I just needed to clean my lens.
That realization was immediately an ah-ha moment for me about life. Sometimes we can have a skewed perspective about something. Maybe we dislike a person, an experience, or a particular idea. Maybe we believe we aren’t good at something or that we aren’t capable of accomplishing something. We go through life believing that, which causes us to avoid whatever it is or to just flat out hate it, when the reality is, the lens we see that experience through is just dirty.
In the case of my phone, my hands are constantly touching the camera lens, dirtying it up and making anything on the other end appear to be much less appealing. In the case of our lives, we have to consider what has constantly been touching us, dirtying up our lens or our perspective about an experience.
It could be something as simple as your parents didn’t like something, so you don’t like it either. If you grew up in a household where you parents never ate seafood, it’s possible that — as an adult — you’ve never even tried seafood because you’re convinced that you won’t like it. So you go through life believing that you don’t like seafood.
Or maybe you had a bad experience with something, and convinced yourself that it’s not for you. If you failed a big math test in 3rd grade, you could have developed the belief that you’re not good at math. Then from that point on, you didn’t even try to study or learn math because you believed that you would fail. You could easily spend your entire life thinking that you suck at math when really, you just had one bad experience that dirtied your lens.
Unfortunately, we usually never take the time to look more closely at how our lenses get dirty. It takes an open mind and the desire to grow in order for us to be willing to dig deeper into a belief we hold about our inability to be or do something to determine whether it’s due to a dirty lens.
If you are finding yourself running into a brick wall, believing that you aren’t capable, check your lens. If you determine that it’s been dirtied, wipe it clean and reshoot your masterpiece.