TRANSCRIPT:

Welcome to Tyler’s Tips. Today I’m going to talk about savoring the experience. So we’re in the midst of a crisis. Why would I want to talk about savoring the experience? As a photographer the best work comes when I feel it here and here and I’m really engaged with that. I’m very present with it. If I can be in touch with what I’m feeling in my heart and what I’m intellectually thinking, engaging with what I’m trying to say visually, I can usually do a pretty good job. In a crisis that’s really hard to do. Some experiences are a little easier to savor than others. For me, personally, I’m sheltering in place with my two children, my eight year old and 11 year old sons and it’s wonderful. In fact it’s almost a magical little retreat. I can dive into that bubble of kid magic and my son can do his homeschooling here with me in the studio and that gives me joy.

It’s very easy for me to savor moments like this where I’m recording it, Tyler’s tip, and my son gets to be here and be part of it and see me do that work. That’s easy. But there’s all this other stuff going on too right now, which some of that’s much harder to savor and I would encourage you to savor those experiences. I want to tell a quick story from my childhood that really helped me understand this. When I was about five, my great grandmother died and my mom, this was her grandmother was getting ready to fly back to the East Coast for the funeral. We lived in Wyoming. That’s where I grew up and before she left, my dad said, “Savor the experience,” and this story’s been retold in my family many, many times. And when I was a kid I didn’t get it.

It seems weird. It seems really weird to say something that seems suspiciously positive about something that’s supposed to be so negative, a funeral. Right? Having stumbled through a few more decades of life and having hit some big bumps along the road, like the death of my father when I was a teenager, the guy who said that, “Savor the experience,” I’ve come to understand, I think a little bit more what he was getting at, and my interpretation of it anyways is that when we’re in a crisis or in a heightened moment, a funeral, a wedding could be positive, whatever, everybody is also in a heightened state, people are more… they’re more engaged, they’re nudged out of regular routines and their regular way of engaging with the world. Emotions are more raw. There’s an opportunity to see and be seen as a person in a way that isn’t possible in our regular daily routines.

So I would encourage savoring not only those experiences that are beautiful and easy to take refuge in right now, but also savor some of the more challenging aspects of this crisis. And then taking that experience of savoring the moment and picking up your camera and telling those stories. Because for me anyways, that’s what I do to really make it whole. So, anyways, thank you for sharing a minute with me here. And as always, I’m grateful for your time and if you have any ideas or concepts that you’d like me to talk about in a future Tyler’s Tips episode, drop me a line and I’ll work it in. Until next time.