Don’t you wish life was like a digital camera? I have recently taken up a new hobby, photography. I spend my free time walking around, sometimes through the woods, sometimes around town, taking pictures of things I see. You may have seen some of these pictures on this blog or my Flickr page. I’ve noticed the more pictures I take, the better I seem to be getting.
I have always liked taking pictures, but back in the old days, it wasn’t an inexpensive hobby. You needed a camera, you needed a roll of film, and you needed to have the film processed. You really couldn’t experiment, unless you had money to play with. You wouldn’t know how your pictures would come out until you picked them up at the local photo processor and then it was a surprise. That all changed with the invention of the digital camera.
These days you can take as many pictures as you want and if they don’t come out, you can hit the delete button and try again. You can experiment with different angles, lighting, subjects, ISO, F-stops, F-Troops, shutter speeds, all kinds of things. Or you can be like me and place the camera in auto mode and press the button. You get unlimited do-overs.
Don’t you wish life was like that? Take for example a job change. After careful thought and consideration, you decide you want to leave one company for another. Maybe it is for the same job, or maybe it is for something entirely new. You need a change and make the move. Wouldn’t it be nice if it didn’t work out, for whatever reason, you could hit the delete button and make another choice? Retake the picture. Tweak the settings. True, you can jump from job to job, but each time you run the risk of going back to zero. You lose seniority, vacation time, the preferred place at the water cooler. If you had a delete button, you could just go back to where you were.
Unfortunately, there is no reset button in life. You make a choice, you are stuck with the consequences. If it was a bad choice, there might be bad consequences. There is no reset button. But there is something you can do. To continue with the photography analogy, you can look at the bad picture you got back from the processor, analyze, figure out what you did wrong, and correct it for the next time. True, you will have to deal with looking at the ugly picture until the new one comes back from the FotoMat, but at least you have learned from your mistakes.
Maybe it is a good thing after all that we don’t have a delete button.
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