Your lock screen says something.

What image is your lock screen right now?

Your significant other? Family? Pet? To do list? Vacation photo?

In the same way our playlist titles must be a personality indicator, I think this small choice is as well. Whatever we choose to put at the forefront of our eyes repeatedly throughout the day—every time we check the clock, check a text, open our phones to distract us from what we actually need to get done—must be saying something about us. If not about our personality, it must be saying something about our state of mind.

Right now my lock screen is a picture I saw in a photography book I found in a North Carolina library back in 2018. The photo was taken by Alec Soth, and for whatever reason, I’m enamored by it.

It’s a seemingly mundane scene—my favorite kind of photography.

A mother and daughter are standing with a gray shopping cart full of plants in a K-Mart parking lot looking right into the barrel of the camera.

The daughter, four or five, has a bandana wrapped around her head, tied beneath her chin, and her little tennies are on the bottom of the cart, clearly mid-joyride. The mother, in a thick knee-length black coat, trousers, and strawberry blonde curls billowed on top of her head, glares at the camera, brow furrowed.

The gray skies and big coats make the case that it’s the tail-end of winter. Their cart of shrubs indicates it’s planting time for their yard. We’re near spring in this photograph and maybe these two went on to plant that greenery in their yard together later that afternoon.

The yellow lines of the parking lot frame the woman, child, and shopping cart, with rows of cars filling the background.

I’ve always loved photographs that capture the 99% of life. The everyday drab, running errands, eating a meal, sitting in the yard—exposing the beauty filling the cracks in between the milestones and big moments. If I took photos, those are the kinds of photos I’d take.

I feel oddly settled by the cold, maternal, no bull-shit scowl of the mother juxtaposed with the softness of the child, her mouth gently gaping open in a curious expression.

What does this lock screen say about my state of mind?

Perhaps I feel myself in the tension between these two contrasts represented by this mother and daughter.

The logical, responsibility-driven part of me that crunches the numbers, strategizes, budgets, and is ready to get down to business lives inside me (she usually runs the show). But I’m at a point in my life where the curiosity-enthused, naively optimistic, playful, and trusting part of me is coming into the picture at the same time.

In between the two, a shopping cart of foliage that, once planted, will hopefully take root, grow, and blossom in time makes me think there’s a possibility this time around that these two separate entities of mine can coexist and create something together.

They don’t have to be opposing forces.

They can co-mingle and blend like freely growing greenery in an untamed garden.

What’s your lock screen saying about you right now?