Brown Pelican : Empowering Boundaries
Brown Pelican
This is a Brown Pelican. In a very meaningful way, you can say that flight defines this bird’s essence. Birds are the creatures of the sky. There’s something boundless, something utterly unfettered and without constraint that we find compelling in a photo like this. There’s something about infinitude, about limitless possibility that resonates. And. These photos are hard. In-flight photos can be an exhausting effort, frequently requiring dozens of exposures to get just the right image. You hope for the right alignment of light and flightpath - and try not to forget you’re standing on a cliff edge…. For us photographers, the essential element, the unbounded flight, is also the challenge that makes receiving the photo so very difficult.
Jewish tradition includes extensive guidelines about charitable giving. For people of typical means, a standard contribution to the poor is 10%. And if someone is so inclined, they may give up to 20%. Imposing a minimum standard is straightforward but why an upper limit? At a practical level, the Sages didn’t want overly-generous people to injudiciously impoverish themselves through too much giving. But I expect there’s more to it. Charitable need is seemingly limitless. Someone always needs. And that depth of endless need can create a psychological as well as a financial tug. An upper cap gives a donor permission to tell herself that she has done all she is allowed to do. Otherwise a tug becomes a drain, a limitless depletion.
In our professional lives, there is an endless list of things to which we can turn our attention. One more product feature, one more administrative task, one more effort to find an edge. Part of work’s fulfillment is precisely this challenge, the calling to be generative and imaginative. At the same time, it can become exhausting, even all-consuming to be constantly aware of the eternally pending. Can we instead delineate what we’ll do in a given timeframe and give ourselves permission to declare, “Enough. For now.”? We need to psychically recharge before facing the next hurdle. After “Enough” - whether a Pelican or charity - we can appreciate our accomplishments and muster strength for the next round of inevitable effort.