handwriting © Lilly Schwartz

The day before yesterday I looked at some of my old notebooks and found one of my lists. I picked up the habit of writing down my goals in neat lists from a personal development book about 4 years ago. I’ve been writing them ever since. The one I looked at the day before yesterday was probably about 1 1/2 years old and it struck me that I had reached all my short term goals, but that I was none the wiser about the long term ones. Granted, they are a bit vague and mysterious like the ominous “Finding a true calling” or even worse “Finding happiness”. Ticking these off would kind of involve figuring out the meaning of life and all that stuff. Not exactly something you can tick off the list during your lunch break. Although such things seem a bit intimidating I also realised that I can be proud of having reached most of my short term goals. It’s something I have worked for very hard and now I can at least try and pat myself on the back a bit, before despairing over not quite having reached the mid-range goals yet. Somehow this list reminded me, how important it is to stop for a moment and appreciate the achievements of a long struggle. It made me feel so good about myself that I decided to start working on one of the other goals on my list. I’m not going to tell you what it is, but it’s something I’ve been wanting to do again for quite some time.

The picture was taken just after I had finished the first step of the work. I’ve tried out the noise reduction in Photoshop on this one and it helped a little bit. High ISO settings are not so great with my 450D, but with black and white I usually don’t mind. Here it made quite a difference to reduce it at least a little bit.