About last week - When a fresh perspective comes from a child. 02/04/2024

A fresh perspective for me. I always love when I get a fresh perspective of something. It's something that I'm really passionate about in life and at Soul Care Bendigo.

The lesson came through over the Easter long weekend from my daughter and i thank her for it. Our small regional city of Bendigo in Victoria Australia, has its big annual Bendigo Easter Festival. With this festival comes parades, rides, show bags, colourful community decorations, craft activities, book stores, markets, Easter egg hunts and lots and lots of Chinese dragons. It attracts an additional 85,000 people to our town. That means more colour, more families, more traffic, more people watching. Just more.

For Christmas last year, we gave our daughter her first phone. We made this choice as a grade six student with a keen interest in photography. We were traveling overseas at Christmas, and she expressed that she'd like to take her own photos.

I have been a mother for 14 years, and in that time, somehow, I became the family photographer.

I always enjoyed taking photos and I always had this borderline obsession in capturing all their moments. The moments that we had together as families, the holidays, birthdays, the parties, the school events, their personal successes and their quiet moments. I captured it all HOWEVER I captured what I enjoyed, what I thought was special, and what I thought needed to be remembered.

The perspective that I've been given this weekend is, that now my daughter has her own camera, I am getting a glimpse into her reflections. As she shows me the photos that she'd taken, I realized that she has a totally different point of view of what she sees and what resonates with her. It's been really interesting as I scroll through her photo gallery, witnessing her point of view of all the things she had captured. The things that I would never have thought to capture. I found myself saying - (I’ll admit with some bewilderment) things like “Why did you take a photo of that?” on the first glance it looked a little like nonsense. She simply with “I liked it, it made me smile.” And it got me realising that if all of my kids had had their own camera for the last 14 years, we would have a totally different set of photos in our family album.

As an adult, I took ones that were creative, and I thought about lighting, and I thought about composition, and I thought about the detail. But when I looked through the photos taken by a child, there was no structure, there was no thought about capturing the art, mood or the life affirming moment. It was much simpler than that. It got me pondering about all the different perspectives we as humans all have on of all sorts of topics and how quick and easy it is to judge it simply because it doesn’t make sense to us. What resonates with us, what we find to be interesting often doesn’t make sense to other people and that’s ok. A conversation that is open minded and curious can easily solve your hesitations or confusion.

It's also the timely reminder of how simplifying, not overthinking changes things. Not trying to get it perfect every single time. My daughter would just snap and forget. And then she'd scroll back and I’d glimpse her smiling. That random goofy photo that she took because they are her memories, not the ones I had been hand selecting based on my preferences.

So, I'm going to hand the phone to my kids more often and allocate them the photographer, so they can capture these events as they choose to remember them.

I going to take the pressure off myself by enjoying the moment and allowing someone else a moment to sit to record this moment for themselves. Then take the gift of sitting with them and hearing their point of view. Sit through their moments, the things that they saw and in the way they saw it. Marveling in the moment from a child's point of view.

It's funny, often in life our children are our biggest teachers. They take us down a peg. Bring us back to play. Bring us back to observation, just for the sake of observation. Not for analyzing.

This childlike place was a nice place to visit.

Have a great week, everyone.