As a beginner , what should my topic be if I I need to solve my mysteries of life?

[mindfulnomad]

<p>Photographer's are writers and painters.<br>

A picture is worth a thousand words.<br>

A picture is painted by the light they see.</p>

<p>Tell a story through the photographs taken, show a story that means something.</p>

[stephen_hipperson]

<p>Opportunity costs is the only relevancy here. You're born, you have a period of life, you die. Once you reach maturity, you're just filling time until you die. Do a good job with your assessment of opportunity costs and you will die a fulfilled individual, make a bad job and you die the same as the rest of us.<br>

If you are a religious person look to your faith for guidance - it's as relevant as anyone else's but will have countless years to back it up.<br>

Do not look down on those who have gone before, they were as intelligent as us, but they didn't know as much. Whether our increased knowledge is a good think is another question, but if you've benefited from it, the question becomes irrelevant, so study their work.<br>

Don't take photographs to conform, take them because the result will mean something to you. <br>

Don't take photographs as isolated shots, but collect series of images, where each series runs a theme or emotion.<br>

Eat, live and breathe photography, but don't become a slave to it.<br>

If asked why you took a particular photograph, if it seemed like a good idea at the time, say that - don't invent some philosophical justification after the event.</p>

[lightwait]

<p>Yeah, 42.</p>

[vince_smith2]

<p>There have been many great answers so far- a lot of talk about how nobody has the answers, that things change constantly, that you need to go with your instincts and have a sense of humor. I was watching a cartoon the other night that summed up all of those things perfectly. I think most of my philosophy is based on cartoons. </p>

<p>The sounds of military helicopters could be heard approaching a town. The people in the town ran out into the streets pannicked at their impending doom. The scene panned in closer to a street with a church next to a bar. The people in the church ran out of it yelling and screaming and headed directly into the bar. At the same time, the people from the bar ran screaming past those people directly into the church.</p>

<p>That sums up my philosophy brilliantly, at least for today. Tomorrow, however, you might catch me running into a church. I'm in a bar right now. :)</p>

<p>Vince</p>

<p>"The activity of art is based on the fact that a man, receiving through his sense of hearing or sight another man's expression of feeling, is capable of experiencing the emotion which moved the man who expressed it." - Tolstoy</p>

<p> </p>

[lightwait]

<p>"The activity of art is based on the fact that a man, receiving through his sense of hearing or sight another man's expression of feeling, is capable of experiencing the emotion which moved the man who expressed it." - Tolstoy</p>

<p>Except that, the man experiences his own emotions Not the emotion that moved the artist. The work serves as a focal point for the man's attention and in this way becomes instrumental to his current lived experience, which will always have an emotional layer. But much of that layer is an integration involving the viewer's, or the listener's, own history and development.</p>

<p>Each "taking in" of an artwork is at once a 'sense reading' and a 'sense giving' enterprise. As your cartoon antidote demonstrates, any given assessment of a matter will most often depend on where you happen to be standing and where you happen to have been.</p>

[vince_smith2]

<p>Thomas,<br>

Great points. In the writing from which I took that Tolstoy quote he talks about "similar states of mind" between the artist and the person viewing the art and discusses common occasions where feelings are shared like when one person laughs and another joins in or one person weeps and another feels sorrow. I agree that the quote taken out of context doesn't convey the fact that art may evoke similar feelings, but each person brings their own point of view into the equation. Also, that was very clever using the cartoon to illustrate your point as well.</p>

[philipward]

<p>I recieved this advice over several pints of Guinness in a Dublin pub many years ago from one of the old bar patrons :Life boils down to three states of being in no particular order.<em><strong>You don,t know what you want. You think you know what you want. You know what you want but don,t know how to get it.</strong></em>Their is no answer.Its what keeps us going.</p>

[tom_thumbnail]

<p>But you don't need to solve the mysteries of life. You need to breathe, and eat, and sleep sometimes, but not much else. You may want to solve the mysteries of life. That's different than needing to.</p>

[tomas_peltan]

<p>If you want to solve mysteries of life... there is only one topic which may help - mysteries of life :-D</p>

[oar]

<p>The answer is already known: you were created by the vast churning of randomness in the cosmos for no reason. True randomness is divine --- entirely beyond human understanding. Humans cannot create or recognize randomness for sure, cannot prove that something is random.<br>

Randomness at large scales on the other hand can create every imaginable type of order (on sufficiently smaller scales).<br>

The chaos spewed you out for no reason --- now you must create the reason for your own being.</p>