The unmistakable sound of large animals crashing through the woods froze me on the trail, and I turned just in time to glimpse the white flag of a deer tail disappearing through the brush. But the second deer, more curious than her buddy, stopped and stared back at me. She was only a few yards away.
Slowly I pulled out my camera, the deer staring me in the face, unmoving, waiting for me to take that perfect wildlife photo we always dream about. I found her in the viewing window, posing majestically. I zoomed in…
Dangit! My camera was focusing on the twigs between me and my subject. As the deer waited patiently, I zoomed back out and slowly tried to zoom in, willing my camera lens to focus on what I wanted to shoot. I knew the deer wouldn’t wait forever. Dangit! There just wasn’t enough contrast between the color of the deer and the winter tree bark. I took the picture anyway, just before the deer scampered off to find her buddy, disappointed with the missed opportunity.
That evening when I looked at my photos, my favorite one turned out to be…the blurry deer photo. There was a twig in the foreground, perfectly focused, as if I had taken great pains to record every crisp detail of it. The background was consumed by a fuzzy, wide-eyed deer. To look at the photo, you’d think I was intentionally shooting the twig, without even noticing the deer in the background.
There was a story in that photo—a lesson—that I knew I had to find. At first I thought the lesson might be about focus, that sometimes we might be so focused on what’s in front of us, that we forget to step back and look at the big picture. But that story didn’t feel right to me because, well, I was trying to focus on the deer, but it just didn’t work out.
Then I realized that the lesson was this: sometimes things don’t turn out the way we want. But that doesn’t mean that the result will always be bad.
One of my favorite movies is “The Natural,” with Robert Redford playing Roy Hobbs, a very promising and talented baseball player. The beginning of the movie shows Hobbs starting to break into professional baseball, when his life takes an unexpected detour, and suddenly we find Hobbs 20 years later playing for a minor league baseball team. He is reunited with his first love, and when she asks him what happened to him all those years, he replies, “My life didn’t turn out the way I expected.” Still, in the end Hobbs’ life seems to reconcile for the better, and though it wasn’t the life he had expected, it was a good life.
When I was in college, I imagined that I would eventually find a job that I loved, get married, and have about five kids. But my life didn’t turn out exactly the way I planned, and though I have a job I love, I have neither husband nor children. But though my life is different from what I would have chosen 25 years ago, it’s still a good life, full of joy and blessings. Sometimes it takes a photo “mistake” to remind me of that.
