William Oldacre Photography

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Where Are We Headed?

Light Signatures series, day, colour photograph, art, abstract, abstract expressionism, creative, city street, urban, downtown, cityscape, speed, blur, movement, motion, blue, green, red, muted, overlapping, waves, circles, patterns, shapes

Red Shapes Over Dark Green, 2013 – Light Signatures :: (click to see more)

I try to imagine how the world will all unfold as time moves on but after a certain number of folds it becomes foggy and indistinguishable from my dreams. I hope the world will spin a certain way but it never does. I’m not sure if its better to constantly dream about what might be or be slapped in the face by what is.

When I was younger, there were lots of things to worry about like the cold war, apartheid, the Berlin wall, nuclear proliferation and lots of doom and gloom about how the future was shaping up. But in retrospect a lot of completely unforeseen things happened, a lot of predicted things never happened and the world is not the place most of us imagined it would become. Our lives are not the ones many of us predicted we’d have.

When I look at my father and my grandmother, part of me thinks my life will run a similar course, but then I listen to the stories from both their childhoods and realize their lives never unfolded the way they thought they would either so why would mine.

Part of us looks out at the world the way it is now and imagines it was always this way and will continue to remain this way. I didn’t realize how untrue this was until I returned to London where I attended university after 10 years away or until I returned to the street in Guelph where I grew up after a similar amount of time – everything had changed – everything that was important in my memory was different.

I wonder how we all manage to function when everything we do is built on shifting sands and uncertainty – but somehow we do and eventually it all works out in the end – doesn’t it.