Tuesday, September 8, 2009

Focus

In my next life I want to be a camera.

Cameras are full of memories. Well, so am I, so that can't be the reason. What is it then? I know. It's because cameras only need to focus on one thing at a time.  No need to juggle this flower with that child on a swing, or with the car racing over the finish line, or with the dog chasing a butterfly. A camera takes one picture at a time. If a picture isn't perfect, it's placed on photoshop and worked with until it is exactly right....one photo at a time.

I want to be able to truly focus on ONE thing until the reason for my focus has been caught and completed. I want the time to see the measure of it's character, capture it, be able to hold it in my hands until I'm ready to put it down. I want to work with it until I've accomplished exactly what I wanted to with it, and then move on to the next venture.

As it is I am constantly trying to focus on my husbands desire for dinner or help in the pasture, with a client's need to be called with a counteroffer, with my daughter's need to have me send her a recipe, with my youngest son's need for me to talk via e-mail with him about where he should work next year, with my oldest son wanting help with painting and decorating his bathroom, with my neice needing to cry over her boy's drug related incarceration, with the church wanting me to visit the woman three blocks down the road, with another client wanting to be shown property this afternoon, with yet another client wanting to buy the same home that I just sold, with a good friend needing someone to tend her dog and water her plants. I tend to lose focus and after a while everything becomes blurred.

I know, I know. Prioritize. Take things one at a time. Easy to say... not so easy to do. How do you tell a child, or a friend, or the love of your life...or, yes, even a client who is trying to build foundations under his dreams, to take a number? How do you really focus on and feel the essence of each moment when your mind is spiraling in seventeen directions?

But a camera? It's whole purpose is to concentrate on only one thing at a time. Yeah, I want to be a camera.

(The good news is, I got some of the angst off my chest and I feel much better now)