Palm Trees of Venice Beach Los Angeles
My favorite city in the States is actually San Francisco since I stayed there for a couple of years. Sadly I didn’t pick up photography while I was there, thus I missed out on so much photo opportunities. It will always be one of my greatest photography regrets.
Since then I only had the chance to visit New York and Los Angeles. This photo was taken at Venice Beach in Los Angeles. What is interesting here is that there is an outdoor gym at the beach. I have never seen an outdoor gym before and it is really one of a kind. It is called the Muscle Beach Gym and was once the home gym of Arnold Schwarzenegger.
I remembered how excited I was when I was moving to San Francisco many years ago. It is weird that when you stay in a place for a long time, all that’s left is to complain about how bad that place is. You always wonder whether the grass is greener on the other side. The problem is that all these expectations only exists in our imagination. It is like expecting a perfect vision of the future and realizes that reality is always different from how you imagine it to be.
The truth is that there will always be something that is good and bad about a place.
I love San Francisco when I was staying there, then I miss Singapore. When I am back in Singapore, I miss San Francisco again. The mind is always comparing, always about the past and future. It doesn’t know anything about living in the moment because if you are fully in the present, the mind disappears.
When you compare, it is likely that you will always end up looking at the negative aspects of the environment. You will never get to appreciate the beauty that a place has to offer. The only way to feel the place is to be there and live the moment. It doesn’t matter where you are in the world, each scene is different, each location is unique. There will never be a perfect place, but if we drop our expectations, it can come quite close.
