Layers of Complexity

At first glance, life appears fairly simple. You begin traveling the full path of life without concern for much of anything. To you, everything is new. It is filled with the mantra, “New, different, or better.”

You’re sure when that view of life begins to change. So many aspects of our lives change when you hit puberty so you’re going to say that’s the reason. For everything. Simplicity gives way to complexity. At puberty.

You understand why when you run over to a friend’s house you can’t run the Mrs. Bremer’s yard. She has her cat buried there and you once stepped on the grave in your unbridled romp through the yard. Your mom still talks about the dressing down she got from the neighbor because you stepped on her cat. Her dead cat. Buried in her side yard next to the camellias. You avoid the yard to not cause your mom any more grief. Especially from Mrs. Bremer who doesn’t have any children. Except for her cat. Her dead cat.

The country store about two blocks away no longer will let you get your mother’s cigarettes and “put it on our tab.” Some other mother’s son did that and smoked the pack of Camels himself. Mom found out when she paid the tab expecting it to be listing only bread, milk, and a Coca-Cola or two, not cigarettes. She’d given them up about a month before. Now nobody but the person who smokes can get cigarettes.

Mowing the grass has gone from a chore requiring nothing more than the speed, energy, strength, and sense of direction to travel a relatively straight line with the mower. Getting the grass cut quickly was more important than anything else. Until the neighbor, Mrs. Bremer, again, mentioned to your father how much she liked the yard of the neighbor on the other side of our house, the Mcdannalds. It looked like it had been cut with greater care with its more rhythmic, smoother mower pattern around the trees and shrubs. Now you spend work much harder making sure the mowed path doesn’t abruptly cut into the previously cut grass so the groove pattern has soft edges and turns and better matches Mcdannald’s attention to detail. It’s prettier.

Now there are added layers to each action. Every task became more measured as additional layers were added to the original plan. There is a new complexity defined by forces outside the task but requiring they be completed as if they were the task itself.

The mowing pattern had to be smoother for appearance's sake, not just to keep the grass low enough so the cat could get through it without getting lost. You have to ask to go to the store to get a Coca-Cola instead of secretly adding it to the tab when you get your mom’s cigarettes. Saving your mom an embarrassing moment with a neighbor now takes precedence over how fast you can run through that neighbor’s yard.

But you’re happy with those things. They’ve met the “new, different, and better” requirements by adding layers of understanding about yourself and the people in your experience. Simplicity has given way to complexity and that’s a good thing.

That’s the life cycle of most photographers. Everything starts out simple. Simple ideas. Creative ideas that require not much more than the essentials. Then creativity gets complex and the ideas gather more dimensions. No longer just simple ideas, they now require adding layers. Problem-solving layers. Layers that expand the original idea. Layers that can alter the original idea so much that it disappears. Layers that add to the creative weight of the idea but distract from the original intent.

This is a good thing. You’ve reached creative puberty where now you can move into a more mature place with your work. Where you can understand that the best part about creativity is knowing about the complexity that can be stifling and finding a way to put that strain, that compressing energy into creative actions that will more enjoy the results.

Learning to adapt to all changes and to excise unnecessary layers will transform your work. It will become the experience flowing from “new, different, and better.”

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