Deja Vu
As a photographer, I try to stay present and capture the moments as they happen. You have to be ready, patient, lucky, and sometimes just at the right place at the right time. Some photos come to you and others you need to search out. As we all know, things change, so to capture the same or similar moment twice is rare...well this is what I thought until I started traveling to Cuba. Described as a city frozen in time, where if things change, they change slowly.. so slow that you almost do a double-take that any time has passed at all.
On this particular day in Havana I went for a walk, with no real destination in mind. The best walks really. I have an old map in the bottom of my bag in case I get completely lost..but the whole fun in wandering is discovering something different. By now the streets and the people of Havana have become very familiar to me, so the chances of getting disoriented is hard. So I continue to wander and observe. As I rounded the bend and lifted my camera to shoot, what I thought to be a cute moment between a boy, his grandfather, and a dog, turned into an instant Deja vu. I thought, hadn't I seen this before, and better yet, hadn't I been inspired just the year before to capture this exact situation with this exact lineup, old man, little boy and a dog wearing the same blue shirt. I took a double-take. There they were, like they had never left the streets and there I was once again as a witness in capturing a moment in their lives. What made me shoot that same thing twice? At first glance, i found the 3 of them endearing, especially the dog wearing his blue coat. Secondly, I loved this idea that each of them were a witness to each other, like a team. Lastly, I was curious about their story.
This image got me thinking about awareness and deja vu's in general. Deja Vu is a French word meaning "already seen" . A word to describe a feeling of having already experienced the present situation. Some say it sparks a specific memory, and signals us to pay attention to what is taking place, to perhaps receive a specific lesson in a certain area and complete what is not yet finished. I like this thought. That our minds every now and then reminds us to be more aware. Why does it feel that when are traveling we tend to have or at least notice more coincidental moments that remind us of past familiarities. Is it simply that when we travel outside our comforts or outside of our regular routines, we are forced to pay attention. Resulting in us being more in tune with ourselves and our surroundings. That when we are fully aware, things seemed more aligned. Things that we might not have seen, become in view. I feel like these coincidental moments of familiarity are happening more than we think, on a regular basis in our everyday life, but we either choose to be in tuned into them or disconnected. I feel most of the time we walk around with our heads down, grabbing only fractions of each experience. As we hurry up livin, taking in very little. Racing from one moment to the next, not giving our minds time to even store a memory or process it all. I'm glad this day I chose to look up and tune in to the present moment once again.