Capturing the Decisive Moments of Life
.𖥔 ݁ ˖🌍-`♡´-
.𖥔 ݁ ˖🌍-`♡´-
“Life is very fluid, sometimes the pictures disappear and there’s nothing you can do.”
Ever since I heard this quote from Henri Cartier Bresson, a renowned street photographer, I’ve thought about the way this idea applies to my own life. Cartier Bresson is a master of recognizing the spontaneous, split-second instances of life that are worth capturing in his photos, but he also acknowledges that “The Decisive Moment” of taking the picture is based on intuition rather than precognition. He even advises against taking too many pictures because it can cause the decisive moment to be missed in between shutters.
So how does this apply to the lives of us non-photographers? Well, sometimes we fall into the habit of feeling like certain moments are life or death. We impose importance on one specific situation as if the result will make or break the trajectory of our lives. The irony is that most of the time, you don’t realize that the pivotal moments of your life are important until way after they happen.
For example, I spent a whole summer stressing about getting into a specific university, and I made myself feel like if I didn’t make my application as perfect as possible, then I wouldn’t get in and my life would be ruined. Looking back now, I realize that the pivotal moments that led me to where I am now happened long before this summer. The truly life-changing moment happened when I played piano for my grandmother years ago. It happened in my junior year when I read an article about Suga from BTS and became interested in his work as a music producer. It happened one regular evening when my dad suggested living in a different country for a year so that I could learn a third language. Each one of these instances felt intuitively important in a way that I couldn’t understand at the time. So how did I manage to take these moments for granted and convince myself that my entire future was decided by one singular college application?
Feeling this sort of anxiety is completely normal, but my advice is to let life flow the way it wants to. In my experience, having confidence that things will always work out well allows for the best possible results. Stressing over a circumstance that feels irrevocably important and unmissable usually isn’t worth it. It’s better to live like Cartier Bresson by recognizing that it isn’t possible to prepare for the decisive moment. The moment of capture relies on both intuition and the innate fluidity of life.
Julia Deabreu (oh.juuliadeabreu)
