When a totally unplanned and impromptu photoshoot falls in your lap, you just say ‘Sure, I can make it work’ even when in the back of your mind you’re saying, ‘It’s so freakin’ hot; the sun is directly overhead; I have less than 30 minutes before I have to pick up my kids’.
And we say yes because excuses strangle us. Life doesn’t always warn us that it’s going to happen. We don’t always get to put things in our weekly planner in fancy writing and glittery stickers or get the morning text alarms from our phones that let us know we have something important going on.
Well, maybe that happens with you. But in my chaos, that never seems to coordinate with how my day plays out, even if I do try to plan ahead. (And, of course, as many of you know, I don’t even have a smart phone so that negates the whole ‘Siri telling me what I should do that day’ type of thing, which I completely have no problem with.) And quite honestly, I’m realizing more and more as I grow older that I work better when I fly by the seat of my pants. I feel better just saying 'let’s do it' in the moment.
There is so much whimsy and spontaneity and magic that happens when I let something unfold that I could have folded up because it isn’t planned and the conditions aren’t right. And it feels so good to lean into that. And I smile a lot more and sweat a lot more and realize that when you have a beautiful person, some rockin’ vintage clothes and a weed-infested-cracked-concrete back alley in the middle of the unrelenting Nevada sun, what could possibly go wrong?!
Cheers to an entire season of Back Alley Summers.