Patience

I am currently recovering from a cold. Nothing unusual about that, but as a consequence my mind is foggy and writing a blog post is challenging. Patience is the word that lept to mind. Patience Lee, it will all return. Then I had a simple idea. Why not share the excerpt from the Mindful Photography Book I am writing about patience. It’s a win win. You get a great article and a mindful photography practice, I don’t have to think (too much!) Here it is.

A Mindful Attitude – Patience

I believe that patience is the underpinning attitude of mindfulness. It is a quality that is both known and elusive. It is the place that allows us to rest in the moment and await the world’s unfolding. The challenge is that your mind, your life and your whole culturally shaped way of being impels you to do stuff.

This western world carries an implication that we are “ok” if you are completing a task or achieving an outcome. You may define yourself as, “good, ok or not bad” if you feel that you are purposeful, if you are doing something. Having a purpose for the day is a positive and life affirming experience. However, if you are to truly experience your activities in a non judgemental way, patience is the quality that allows you to fully integrate the experience.

Patience in the moment allows you to be with whatever the experience is. It allows you to rest with your sensory experience. To notice the thoughts that swirl and pass through your mind. To recognise the feelings that arise. With patience you rest with the present experience and don’t rush off to experience “better” ones.

This can be particularly true of “unpleasant” experiences. In these circumstances your coping mechanisms may include delusion (pretending or convincing yourself that the experience is not unpleasant), avoidance or distraction (not thinking about the experience, doing something else) or destruction (when you take action to remove or obliterate the experience!)

Patience is the attitude that allows you to rest in each and any moment. It allows each moment to unfold in its own time. In that space you can then know yourself by becoming attuned to the body’s responses and sensory information, by noticing the thoughts and feelings that arise in your consciousness. Patience supports the practice of being, or living holistically.

My development of a chronic health condition has provided ample opportunity to practice patience: patience with the immediate struggle to breathe; patience with the slow healing process; patience with my feelings of frustration, fear and anger; and patience with others reaction to me, their judgements, their behaviours and their inability to appreciate what is going on for me. Sometimes I imagined that I could be with all of it, that I was patient. Perhaps this was not patience, but numbness. Sometimes it was pure stoicism, a learnt behaviour from all those miles and miles pounding the roads enduring the discomfort, the pain and the desire to sit down.

My experience tells me that true patience, rather than numbness or stoicism, comes hand in hand with understanding and acceptance of the situation. And that is the lifetime practice and at the heart of my book.

 As applied to photography

Patience supports your development as a mindful photographer. You need to be patient in the moment of creating a photograph. When you bring the camera up to your eye to compose and press the shutter there is a drive fuelling your action. This drive is the same one that impels you to keep doing stuff in your life. It is the drive to capture the moment in a “good” photograph. You believe that your purpose in that moment is to create a photograph. It is more than this.

All of the processes, thoughts and actions that are necessary to create a photograph – from learning all the technical and compositional theories, to truly seeing all that is front of us (the shapes, colours, patterns etc) – are just part of the process. You need to be patient over many days, weeks and years as you acquire and deepen this knowledge. You then need, in the moment of pressing the shutter, to let all of the associated photographic ideas and thoughts to wash over you, to release the drive and just be with the experience.

Only then, in a quiet and connected place, will you instinctively reflect your inner experience in your outward view (the photograph). Perhaps this is better explained by a master of the art.

“I believe that, through the act of living, the discovery of oneself is made concurrently with the discovery of the world around us, but which can also be affected by us. A balance must be established between the two worlds – the one inside of us and the one outside of us. As a result of a constant reciprocal process, both these worlds come to form a single one. And it is this world that we must communicate.” Cartier-Bresson ‘The Decisive Moment’ 1952

Patience forms the loving hands that embrace your desire to create personal resonant photographs of your world.

A Mindful Photography Practice 8 – Just Sit

The purpose of this practice is to develop patience. Choose a location and scenario to photograph where the creation of a personally resonant photograph will require patience. Here are a few examples

• A sunrise – getting up super early, getting to the location in plenty of time, sitting and waiting. Create photographs throughout the sunrise.
• A technical aspect of photography that you find challenging. This could include panning, intentional camera movement, night time light trails, freezing fast moving objects eg sport, nature.
• A portrait photograph of someone you know but find challenging (patience with your feelings of discomfort)
• A sunny day moving shadow. Choose a location where a shadow of an object is cast. Set up in a fixed spot, use a tripod if you have one. Sit next to the camera and create one photograph every 20 minutes. Only sit, wait and observe for each 20 minutes; no reading, no smartphone, do nothing. Just be present.