NPR - I'm amazed

I'm amazed how fast and easy life can get out of control or way off track, and you're sitting at the desk or the computer terminal, with the stuff you had planned to do still there and the list of things to do unchecked. Life simply got away from you and took you so far away you forgot much of what you wanted to do. And even for weeks to months. Life is like that.

And while, you're either simply nodding in agreement or shrugging a "Huh", I'll explain. In August I took a hiatus from photography, something I've done throughout my life after getting a camera in the fall of 1969. It was then mostly because work simply took too much time which left little time for much else except the basics of life. Add a marriage and other events, and photography wasn't my priority. I had to find the time for it in the gaps left.

And add to that my lifelong (genetic) Dysthymia, and the passion and spirit for photography just falls into the well, to sink to the bottom like a rock. And it felt like the peebles in your shoe when you can't stop to do anything about it. Eventually sunlight sneaks back into my soul, and eventually I begin to see as a photographer folllowed by picking up the camera bag and working again. It's been an endless cycle throughout my life, my inconsistency in my photography.

And I had planned retirement to provide the time to focus more on learning, or relearning, and doing photography, adding a large format and a digital camera systems. It's been working, and far better than I expected, but not as fast I had thought. That was due to my really bad guess of my learning curve and my learning speed. In retirement, without the pressure of being held to deadlines, goals and plans - just mine - things did a really big slowdown.

The slowdown was intentional. I hate deadlines and always struggled with them in my career. That doesn't mean I missed them, I rarely did. I just prefer to work by milestones than deadlines, letting the work and workflow determine the progress than some artificial date that rarely has any meaning in real life. And every time bosses argued for them, it wasn't hard to defuse their arguments as arbitrary than real.

Anyway, you can see I'm wandering again, something I'm prone to do, and often like to do, in retirement. Well, in August, the trusty, dusty (meaning I rarely wash and especially wax it) van went in for its annual tuneup, and then experience problems from a loose sparkplug which required putting it in the shop several times. And then I had some health issues that haven't fully sorted themselves out - which makes being a couch potato a good experience, especially with Law&Order (any series) marathons on TV.

Every time I got the camera bags out - one for each of the three different systems - life just snuck into the way to the door with the bags. And while I finally got the photographic spirit back, the passion hasn't fully returned enough to pick up the bag and get out the door. Yet, anyway. But ever so slowly, my feet are heading out the door where the camera bags have been waiting.

But that's the reality of my life.