Rhetoric Ramblings

Life is complicated. Life is beautiful. Yet, somehow and someway, life is simultaneously-simple. What we make of life has a unique way of 'making' us. I love to head downtown Los Angeles mid-week with just a camera and a dream-attempt to catch a glimpse into the temperature of society; not on a climatic level, but on an internal level. I always say people watch instead of watch people because it seems substantially less-creepy.

Their are immense benefits to taking some time to just sit and be still; in public. Their are obvious perks of doing so in the quiet of your own home and enjoying the overall pleasure of just being able to escape the chaos of everyday life. However, when you sit and be still in public your perspective is shifted from internal to external and you begin to develop a more intricate-sensitivity towards others, instead of primarily to yourself. Their is something disturbingly-poetic about viewing into people's lives by a gaze into their countenance. People's poker faces grow worse and worse, day after day, and they cannot hide their true state-of-being from the intense-onlookers.

Although culture and societal structure as a whole has made way for everyone to be 'themselves', very few will ever find confidence in doing such. One must put themselves into a condition of exposed and radical vulnerability to truly be 'themselves'. Just think, how often are you true to what you know is right? What is noble? What is just? How often do we shed layers from righteousness for personal gain? Or to avoid embarrassment? It's not as easy as the media tells us it is. Being true to yourself is so much more about understanding your failures and adjusting them than it will ever be about boasting in your accomplishments; creating glory for yourself as if you deserve a golden statue and some incense burned in your name is not the path to a better understanding of self.

I love to jump on the Metrolink from Newhall to Union Station, than head over to Hollywood&Highland. You walk a few steps and get onto an escalator and out you peek out to the walk of fame and all the other chaos at the Kodak. If you've never been people watching before this is an abominable place to start; theirs everything from midgets with Mexican fighting masks to full-grown men dressed as Superman and Spider-man. You'll see a peace protest, an Armenian trying to sell you a Hollywood Star Tour, an attempted up-and-coming hip-hop artist trying to pawn off his terrible mixed-CD to you, and twenty homeless people with signs they think are 'unique & entrepreneurial'. It's overwhelming. However, each face has a story, each person a name, and everyone of them is worth your time and observation.

One thing that I find fascinating and captivating about photography is the unique opportunity to capture a single-moment in time. To think, that no one else will ever be able to duplicate that time in place, that event, that angle, ever again. When I people watch I like to think that when I see certain people that it may be the only time we ever see one another and for some reason our lives have brought us together for a mere-moment and here we are. A smile can carry a memory further than a frown. I love to smile because in my heart I'm happy, even when in my mind I may be struggling. So, when time and space brings me into connection with someone like that I want to impact and influence their lives with whatever joy I can; even if that only means a smile to brighten a minute-fraction of their life.

The fiercest of strangers can be turned into a friend often times with the simple-diffusion of distress by a mere-smile. So, why do we find the need to make other people's lives worst by swearing at them in traffic and cussing them out from behind our steering wheels. We use hostility in whatever form it takes us over to show our inner struggles; whereas in reality, we should be operating more self-control instead of making others lives miserable. I love life. I have my issues as do whoever is reading this blog. However, their is something insurmountably beautiful about bettering those around us by choosing joy despite sorrow. When I people watch I often times consider how fortunate we all are to be engaging in freedom without the oppression so many nations face; I look to other faces to find the contentment that I've discovered, hoping I'm not on this island of thought alone.

"Strangers are friend you've yet to meet..."