Change is Hard (At Least You Aren’t a Lobster)

Something a little different for you this morning. 

My heart stopped dead when I saw the black snake in my tent. Walking barefoot to the washroom in the middle of the night, my mind needed no time at all to jump to the certainty that what I was looking at was not just any snake but one of the most dangerous snakes in Africa—a black mamba. 

I froze, very nearly freeing myself from the need to go all the way to the toilet to do that for which I’d awakened. My mind raced, my heart quickened, and my vision did that thing where everything goes blurry but then gets super-humanly sharp, which I guess is nature’s way of helping us deal with danger, to assess threat, and, in my case, to slowly realize that what I was looking at was not a black mamba, but the black camera strap I’d removed from my 600mm lens the day before. It must have fallen on the floor as I got ready for bed. God, I hate camera straps.

I still like snakes, though. When I was a kid, I collected them. At one point, I had 30 snakes in my bedroom, all quite harmless. They lived in aquariums that I would buy at yard sales and kept from escaping—for the most part—with pieces of plywood across the top. Now and then, a snake would get out, and the woman who came in once a month to clean the house would burst into tears, threaten to quit, and never return. My mother would happily find the snakes, pick them up, and return them to their glass homes without blinking an eye and then, I’m certain, renegotiate our cleaner’s hourly rate.

I kept the snakes for the summers and every fall, returned them to the woods and marshes where I found them, leaving behind half a dozen empty aquariums and, if I was lucky, some snake skins.

Snakes, like many animals, shed their skins. In the case of snakes and lizards, what they leave behind is a husk—a ghostly structure from which they crawl. Humans also shed their skin, though we do it constantly, a few cells at a time, and not all at once on the bedroom floor, which is probably a blessing for a guy who gets freaked out by something as harmless as a camera strap. Can you imagine?

Snakes shed their skin because they grow, and their skin does not. Lobsters experience the same thing. In order to grow, they molt, shedding their old shells and emerging with a new, soft one that hardens over time until it too is cast off, and the cycle repeats itself. Lobsters literally crawl out of themselves alive to grow. Meanwhile, I can’t even bring myself to throw out a favourite old t-shirt that no longer fits. Harder still to cast off habits or ways of thinking we’ve outgrown.

So what does this have to do with your photography or creative life? The first lesson should be abundantly clear: don’t leave your camera straps lying around if you prefer not to piss yourself in the middle of the night. The second is a little more abstract: sometimes, you have to make wildly uncomfortable changes to accommodate the person you’re becoming or want to become. Big, scary changes. I can’t speak to the emotional life of the lobster, but I can’t imagine it feels great about leaving its armour behind and living without the comfort of that protection for the couple of weeks it takes for its new shell to harden.

I wonder if the lobster even knows what’s going on. Does it understand these changes, or, like me, does it freak out, Google its symptoms, and assume the worst? In these moments of perceived calamity, is it certain that its world is never going to be the same or that the end is nigh? Does it go to the same dark places in its mind that I do in the middle of the night when I can’t sleep? Do snakes? Can you imagine crawling out of your own skin? And what do you do with the husk that’s left over? Is it garbage? Recycle? Does my municipality allow it in the organic waste bin? You could be grateful you’re not a lobster; they eat their discarded shells.

Wow, this one got away from me quickly. Snakes? Lobsters? Sorry about that. Too much coffee this morning. I just wanted to remind you that change is hard. It’s uncomfortable and scary. It’s often the cost of moving forward in both life and art. And very often, it feels like failure. I doubt lizards and lobsters are as neurotic as we are; they simply do what they need to do to move forward and grow into their new selves. They don’t look back at their old selves with recrimination, the way we sometimes do, as if the person we once were could have (or should have) done the kind of work we do now. As if they should have known better or done better.

Forward, ever forward, my friend. Change is necessary. Sometimes we grow and need to change to accommodate that forward momentum. Sometimes it’s the other way around, and we need to change to stimulate that growth. Sometimes it’s hard to know which is which, though I’m not sure that really matters. It only matters that we change, and it might help if we’re not so freaked out by it all. So often the thing we’re afraid of isn’t at all what we think it is. 

For the Love of the Photograph,
David