When the traffic light won’t change to green

It’s over a month since my last post and that’s mostly because I hit something of a roadblock in my photography. Actually, a roadblock in my creativity in general.
There are plenty of books and videos that will tell you about this happening and ways to overcome it. They didn’t work for me.

I got frustrated with the situation and with myself; the bloody awful weather didn’t help but reflected my mood. Then one day the sun was out and I jumped on my motorbike and went for a ride. No particular destination in mind, I just rode and enjoyed the feeling of being out on the bike in the sun. I came across some roadworks and a small queue of traffic waiting at the traffic control lights. Over the next couple of minutes, the queue behind me grew, a few cars came the opposite direction but the traffic light stayed on red. FOREVER!
At least that was how it felt but a minute later it changed to green and off we all went. I realised as I traversed the roadworks that the reason the light had taken as long as it did was that it was part of a four-way setup so there was a lot of vehicle management to be undertaken.

As I cleared the roadworks and continued my ride, I thought about how little of my overall ride had been affected by that ‘delay’. In the scheme of things, it was a fraction of my time on the bike that day and by the end of the ride it was forgotten. That is until the other day when I was out in Liverpool and took just a few shots on my Olympus EM1 MkII and posted them to Instagram. I realised then that a month is such a small fraction of the life journey, a short wait at a traffic light that I had confidence would turn green eventually.

It did!