Learning the hard way

So they say if you make a mistake you learn from it, but what happens when it isn’t your fault or out of your control? Is it the balance of the universe, that in order for good things to happen to you, you have to experience the bad things too?  Yesterday, a terrible accident occurred. It saw me howling with grief in a messy pile on the floor, at the loss of my past two weeks of photos taken on my camera. Long story, short: sister and I took artistic photos, I let sister look at camera, sister presses some buttons, camera deletes all photos, including precious pictures taken with relatives who we only see once a year, days spent with friends and photography I had taken. Has there ever been a moment when you’ve lost hours worth of work on a computer, and a sudden wave of frustration combined with anger coupled with sadness mixed with utter disappointment surges through you, and at a loss for words, you cry your eyes out. Maybe I was just overreacting when I wailed over my lost photos, but the knowledge that all that time setting up scenes for pictures had gone to waste, that I would never again have a frozen memory of that day with friends and I kept on thinking “How could she have been so stupid as to press the delete button?! You have to go through like, three different stages to do that!” After finally getting a grip back on reality, I reminded myself that I am powerless to do anything about it, and the pictures are irretrievable. All I could do was move on. A hint of guilt snuck its way into my conscience and told me that there are billions of starving people out there who are struggling to feed themselves, never having even seen a camera, and I was a disgrace to society for whining about some deleted images that could always be taken again, another time. What was the lesson in this? Don’t ever let somebody else use your camera? Always set protection on your favourite photos so they cannot be deleted? Upload photos regularly so they can’t be lost? Life’s a bitch? I'm guessing all four.
Why do things work out the way they do? I could blame karma for what happened, that squashing that bug to its death has finally caught up with me and what goes around comes around. I could blame my sister’s short attention span or inability to work a camera. I could blame the “Camera software recovery program” for not being able to retrieve my lost images. Yet, perhaps it was no ones fault, and I am not being punished for my wrongdoings. Maybe we don’t need to understand why bad things happen in this world, maybe they just befall us and we have to accept them, deal with them and move on. It could be a test of character. What still baffles me though, is that no matter how much preparation or effort goes into something, there will always be a chance that it won’t work out, and failure is always a possibility. I had been planning the photo shoot for weeks in advance and my sister is the technology whizz of the family, yet still, what happened, happened and the photo shoot did not go ahead. Disturbances will interrupt how things turn out, obstacles block our way and when you think you know everything about a person, they will always turn around and do the complete opposite of what you expected.
For some reason, whenever I really, really want something to happen, thinking and wishing and hoping for it - it avoids me. When I've given up hope on it, stopped believing in it, what do you know? The one time it isn’t on my mind,  it happens. You thought that if you work hard you will be rewarded? You will. But not when you think you will, as nothing is for certain. You know what I think? The only thing that is for certain, is change.