The Choice— GC Myers 2017
There is nothing in this world that does not have a decisive moment.
–Cardinal de Retz (1613-1679)
Photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson , a favorite of mine, took that phrase from the quote above and used it to describe that moment in searching for an image when the photographer makes the creative decision to snap the photo. But I see the term at play in everything we do, everything we are. Who, what, and where we are is all the result of random moments of decision. Every day offers us new choices for moving ahead and very seldom do we ponder where these often simple and mundane decisions might ultimately lead our lives.
I think about this all the time when I consider the course my life and career has taken. Several of the galleries in which I show came about as the result of a series of random decisions– and a few moments of serendipity!– and if any of those choices leading up to the final result had differed in any way, my life as it is now might be completely different.
Even the beginning of my painting career might not have occurred if I had decided that working off a ladder on that September day twenty years ago was not a great idea. I would not have fallen and would not have found the time or inspiration to begin painting. Maybe it would have come anyway at some other point but who knows? And would that decision to follow painting at that later date yield the same results?
I see it in genealogy as well. When I look at the charts that show one’s whole ancestry laid out in an ever-widening mesh of connections all I can think is how we are all built on a huge set of random choices and pure chance. If any single one of those many thousands of connections had not been made the whole mesh that brought us here would fall away and our very existence would most likely not have occurred.
Our existence relies on so many ifs: If one ancestor had not returned from the many wars, if one ancestor had not been the lucky child that survived the many diseases that took so many children from most families in the earlier days of our country, if one ancestor had turned left instead of right and not met that person who became their other half.
It’s a delicate dance of decisive moments that leads us all to the here and now.
We can try to consider what each conscious decision we make might someday yield but there are so many decisions made on a daily that seem so inconsequential that they easily escape our notice. We often don’t realize the magnitude of a decision until much later and are either enjoying or suffering the result of a decision from our past.
Only then do we recognize it as the decisive moment.
I guess the best we can do is to use our best judgement in those decisions we truly consider and hope that who we are at our core allows us to make wise choices on those that we fail to consider fully.
I am reworking an old blog post from about 12 years ago to highlight the painting at the top from 2017, The Choice. It’s one of those pieces that jumped at me when I painted it, becoming an instant favorite of mine, but never clicked for anyone else. Over the years, as much as I liked it from the start, my appreciation for it has only grown. Maybe it’s because I see it as a representation of the choices and decisive moments that brought me to this here and now.
Or maybe not. I can’t decide…
Redtree Times 