It’s been almost exactly a month since I’ve last done any blog writing — except for three quick pieces on the hockey lockout, it’s been mostly on autopilot.
I’d apologize to you, loyal readers (both of you!) but to be honest, I needed it.
I’m old, Gandalf. I know I don’t look it, but I’m beginning to feel it in my heart. I feel… thin. Sort of stretched, like… butter scraped over too much bread. I need a holiday. A very long holiday.
Unlike Bilbo, I knew I was returning, but it was definitely a time to back off, take a break, think things through and start making some decisions I’d been putting off for the last few months. I’ve been in a bit of a crunch at work trying to wrestle a project into submission (and I finally have, but it took some doing), and I was finding I was increasingly mentally exhausted when I got home in the evening and it was just difficult to get motivated to spend time writing; when I did, I wasn’t happy with the quality or attitude of it.
I finally realized it was time for a break, and I went and dove deep into Diablo III, and decided not to come out until that little voice in me told me it was time to get back to work. It started murmuring about a week ago, and so I’ve been splitting my evenings between driving my level 60+2 Barbarian deeper into the dungeon (about to go after certain body parts in the desert in inferno mode….) and sitting down and doing some serious planning for where I want to drive the blog and what my plans for 2013 are going to be overall.
Because — god help me — it’s November. Somewhere along the way my plan to visit Yellowstone didn’t happen, and so I shifted my plans to Eastern Sierra fall foliage, and that’s not happened, and.. (and, well, “it’s complicated”, but certain things that live off blog and which aren’t work related were, I thought, due to be handled in July or August, and are still being wrestled into completion here in November. That’s life some days. weeks. months. And there’s some hope we may actually get them taken care of this month, but then again, until it’s done, it’s not done). But I’d decided to hold the vacation until this was resolved, and it turned out that had dragged it all out. Of course now, I’ve not only missed the weather window for where I wanted to visit, now we’re into hard holiday mode, and taking a hunk of time off to go out with a camera and see what happens just isn’t going to happen.
Until maybe January. We’ll see. So that’s part of the reason behind the mental vacation of just closing up shop and beating the crap out of random monsters on random levels of dungeons for a while… While it’s not the same as getting out on the road — it works.
And then Mark popped up…
Nature Light Photo » Sunrise on a New Beginning – Nature Light Photo:
Almost two years ago, I stopped shooting. Lots of changes in my life. Lack of interest. Lack of desire. A received lack of talent. I just had no motivation to pick up a camera, find a subject, and shoot. Sure, I would shoot something close to home. Fireworks over Disneyland on the fourth of July. An interesting bird in the backyard. Something I was doing around the house. But there was no extra effort to pack up some gear and travel to find a subject.
[….]
I kept following a few photography blogs. I followed Scott Bourne’s Photofocus blog because he almost always writes about being inspired and thinking creatively. I followed my favorite photographer, G. Dan Mitchell. He is has the ability to shoot ordinary subjects in an extraordinary way. I don’t always like his work, but it always makes me ask if I like it, what I’d do different, and why. And I continued to follow Chuqui because he is an ordinary guy like me who just keeps plugging along doing what he loves to do; blogging, birding, shooting, following hockey and technology, and staying in the public eye. I admire that. (italics mine)
Mark and I met at Morro Photo Expo a few years ago, and we’ve kept in touch on and off. He’s a damn good photographer, pushing more into landscape the way I’ve tended to push more into bird photography, but our level of expertise and interests meshed well and he’s a truly nice guy that was fun to hang out with at the conference. He also lives very close to my mom, so there was that constant threat of buying coffee for him, invariably thwarted by some scheduling issue every kamikazee run I made to see Mom.
And then he dropped off the face of the earth for a while, and that got me worried, but every so often, he popped up so I knew he was at least alive and it was voluntary… Now, he seems to be surfacing again, which is awesome.
And if he thinks I’m immune from the things he’s gone through the last few years, he’s wrong. For me, the last six months have turned into what I can only describe as “The Big Pivot”, interest and motivation, questioning why I even bothered, and trying to figure out what my interests really were and where I wanted to put my time and energy into that might actually generate something of value.
It is honestly a bit disconcerting to ask yourself “am I bringing something useful to the discussion, or am I just enjoying listening to myself babble?” and not have a good answer; so I went off to find that answer, and find the places where I could be useful to the discussion and not just another random voice filling in the background — and whether those places were actually places I wanted to be. Or whether anyone would even notice or care if I just never came back from hiatus.
I’ve finally answered some of that questions to my own satisfaction, at least well enough to for me to slog off on the next stage of this journey we call life. And I’ve figured out how I took my photography off the rails and maybe I’ve got that back on track.
Or maybe not. we’ll find out together. At least I know the direction to march, and feel comfortable marching.
And feel like marching (although to be honest, I intend to finish Inferno level with this barbarian before mothballing Diablo for a while, but I’m going to be splitting my time rather than simply killing things in the evenings…)
While it didn’t start out that way, 2012 turned out to be a year to restructure and regroup and refocus. And now, it’s time to get going so that 2013 starts with some traction and momentum — and, I hope, some enthusiasm again. And then we’ll see what happens.
(this weekend, Laurie and I are looking to head out to Merced NWR to chase the geese and swans, and it’ll be the first significant photo outing for me in about 9 months. And it’s a scouting trip for some things I’ve been planning for this winter, if all works out… More on that, soonish…)
A hard lesson I’ve learned this year: sometimes the best thing you can do is — nothing. Downtime is an important part of life, too, and if you forget that, you’ll at some point regret it.
This article was posted on Chuq Von Rospach, Photographer and Author at Getting back on the horse. Um, blog….. This article is copyright 2013 by Chuq Von Rospach under a Creative Commons license for non-commericial use only with attribution. See the web site for details on the usage policy.