Today I am pondering. Not the photo below, which has nothing to do with this post. I included it because a photography blog should have at least one photo 'just because'. Or maybe its inclusion does have something to do with my pondering. You can be the judge.

The photo was made during one of our really cold snaps a couple of weeks ago. When we get temperatures in the single digits or below zero F, frost makes some neat patterns on enclosed but unheated parts of the house like the garage or the enclosed porches. I should maybe keep this a secret but the bright circle is not the moon. It is one of the lights inside the garage reflecting off the glass (I shot the photo from inside with a macro lens). It looked like the moon shining through the window so I deliberately included it.

This post was prompted by two things I read today. The first was an article on why we tend to be less open to contemporary music as we age. That was on a subscription-based site so I won't link to it. The other was on Kirk Tuck's blog <https://visualsciencelab.blogspot.com/2023/02/it-was-black-and-white-day-in-downtown.html>. Like the gallery owner that Kirk talks about encountering on his walk, I am 78 so the comments strike a chord with me, particularly "been, there, done that, a thousand times".

In regard to both music and photography (including my own). I think those "thousand times" are what makes us more discriminating with age, and less ready to be excited by contemporary iterations of what we have experienced or done ourselves so many times already. At the same time, we get comfortable with those earlier experiences which become harder and harder to top in terms of originality and quality.

There is also a tendency to get stuck in a rut and I find myself fighting the rut more and more, going back to the same places to hike and make photographs. The pandemic only worsened that tendency on my part. Currently, winter is weighing on me and keeping me from venturing too far afield. Here is a wish for an early spring and some fresh inspiration.