Passion becomes obsession for a nature photographer, a famous actor, and his agent in modern-day Los Angeles after the photographer inadvertently captures pictures of the actor with an underage starlet.
Focus Lost, scheduled to be published in early 2019, will be Doug’s third book.
We all take probing looks into the mirror, expecting to find life’s elusive truths. We peer deep into the eyes of the person across from us wanting answers. But while the reflection is usually a pronounced part of the plaguing problem, the mirror casts more delusion than truth, creating the deception that we each are a separate existence, isolated and unconnected to others and our surroundings. To bring verity to this self-indulgent fantasy of staring into such a specious speculum, we should strive to see those that anger, frustrate, and are less fortunate than us. We are them, and they are us.
Just little bit farther; wait a little bit longer; one more time, and it’ll happen. Isn’t that what we tell ourselves? Grit, determination, perseverance. That’s the foundation of all success stories, right? But it’s also the script of most abject failures, too. We get so locked in on an idea, a direction, a destination, that we lose all perspective. Stopping would mean that we were misguided or wrong. But in the moments we admit how lost we are is when we may have the most clarity. To go any farther only moves us further away from what we really need.
Life is tough. People, places, experiences, seemingly stack up against us, conspiring to keep us from what we are meant to do. We fight, scratch, and grind, but at every turn, someone or something is ready to foil our progress. It doesn’t matter what we do. The world is against us. But maybe as we toil in the rubble of our attenuate aspiration, we should notice what is common in all these tales of contrived sabotage. Protagonist, antagonist, or supporting character, we are in there somewhere. We may play the victim, but the only thread in all the drama is us.
We want space — to be free and encumbered — to pursue whatever we want and become whomever we desire. But the experience is rife with change, uncertainty, and never-ending challenge. A moment of clarity and achievement quickly becomes despair and failure before we even have time to appreciate what has happened. It is this oscillation between aimless wandering and firm grounding that produces the sense of self we seek. We must rest in all experiences and learn what they have to teach us. In an instant, they’ll be gone, and the chains of responsibility will become our wings of freedom.
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