Peanuts In My Pocket

It happens to me all the time. I’ll be walking along with friends or family and, suddenly, I stop, pull out my phone, and take a photo. I do it every day. It’s such a part of who I am that I imagine people thinking, “We lost Joe again.”

Until I scratch the itch, my world narrows to a single focus. I need to capture what my photographic eye sees. It feels like a compulsion.

I take a lot of bad photos. Or maybe more accurately, I take a lot of photos that only mean something to me. The meaning feels important in the moment, but a few days later it can feel distant, even a little strange.

There’s a big gap between what I see in my mind’s eye and what I can actually produce with a camera. I miss that mark most of the time. Every now and then, though, I get it right. When the image matches what I imagined, the dopamine hit is real.

But more often, it’s just a photo of a tree.

And that’s okay. I enjoy the process enough that I don’t mind the misses. There’s a kind of reward in the act itself. It calms my overactive mind. I need that, even when the result is only a photo of a tree.