I started taking shitty pictures for fun in 2018. My company’s CEO dropped one of his signature inspirational emails on the New Years Eve prior (hold your groans). In it he concluded that the reason the days of each year pass slowly, but the years ultimately run together when we reflect on them is that the experiences they’re woven together from are fairly uniform. He reasoned that most of us stop learning new skills once we enter the career world, save for those skills mandated by the roles we play in our personal and occupational lives and a hobby or two, as time allows. If you were hoping for a statistic to back that assertion up, I’m fresh out. Our fearless leader challenged us to choose a new skill and give ourselves three years to master it; then move on to another.

I’m endlessly curious by nature, and have a passion for learning itself more that doing anything lucrative with that knowledge – as evidenced by my retirement account balance. Photography seemed like a starting point that could augment other interests. I love being in nature, traveling and cooking -all interests with a visual element worth preserving. I’d just moved to Colorado – one of the most beautiful states in the country – I had endless opportunities to practice my new craft while becoming better acquainted with my chosen home. I’d be on my way to creating beautiful images in no time!

Four years, a handful of workshops and countless dollars later, I’m just getting to a point where the outcomes of my photographic endeavors are decent enough to share. That’s a year past deadline for mastery, for anyone who is tracking; and I’m still sporting the Novice badge. In that time, I’ve learned a few other things. Some of those lessons have been voluntary and pleasant. Others have been unwelcome and incredibly difficult; but necessary, all the same. My camera has become a tangible reminder that absolutely everything appears different based on the lens through which we view it, and that how and when we change our perspective on ourselves and the world around us it entirely up to us.

One very critical thing I’m learning is that we’re all on our own journey. That’s a statement so so trite you can purchase it sewn onto a throw pillow at Bed Bath and Beyond. Yet most of us operate off a checklist of milestones when we evaluate our lives, and we feel inadequate when our list has more boxes left open than our peers would have if they were working from the same one. No matter how strategic you are, life is something that is almost impossible to plan. At the same time, failure to attempt to plan isn’t likely to take you anywhere you want to go.

Steering with a loose grip is something I’m still working on some aspects of. Starting over in any area of your life in a practical sense is one thing. Being able to make the adjacent emotional pivots is entirely another, and until those adjustments are complete, I often feel blown off course. It is in those moments that I lean into curiosity as a means of creating meaning and purpose that extend beyond my finite existence. I throw myself into cooking and the enjoyment of a great meal in any setting because I believe it’s difficult to overstate the value of gathering in support of one another; in providing sustenance to the body and spirit in tandem. I take another crack at the puzzle that is photography to maintain awareness of how much there is to appreciate in our world even as we’re constantly inundated with evidence of all that is toxic about it. And I travel because to immerse myself in any other place than the ones I see every day is a nice reboot. And if that place is foreign enough to make me feel small, to give me a sense of just how mundane and insignificant my stresses are in the vastness of the human experience, all the better. I hope to share some of those experiences and lessons with you here.

You can only connect the dots to see how your story falls together in hindsight. That makes it difficult to say whether adopting a practice of lifelong learning can be the antidote to stagnation and source of purpose in and of itself, but I’m giving it a shot.