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| looking down howard street toward twin peaks // howard street bridge // whole foods pride bag // brannan st muni |
Wow, what's this? A real blog entry? Amazing. This week is starting to be a little less apocalyptic, and the fog came back this morning so we are no longer roasting to death in our home! The photos above are all from yesterday, from late afternoon to my evening walk home from a (great!) photography meeting, and a quick trip to Whole Foods. I do, I really do, love summer.
That said, I have been preparing this particular post in my head for months and months (years?) but wasn't ready to write it all out until this week. Which, I suppose, is very fitting. I am really ready to jettison this "too serious" attitude I've had for the last couple of years. Sheesh!
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The illimitable, silent, never-resting thing called Time, rolling, rushing on, swift, silent, like an all-embracing ocean-tide, on which we and all the universe swim like exhalations, like apparitions which are, and then are not.... ~Thomas Carlyle
Last year, on June 15th, there was a full moon lunar eclipse in my sign, Gemini. It also happened to be two days before my birthday, a powerful position that indicated much change for me in the year following it. So much change, in fact, that I was told my life would be very different a year after this eclipse, and it would be positive change, even though I couldn't possibly see it at the time. I was going through a lot of melodramatic upheaval at that time (normal Saturn Return stuff), so this all seemed very plausible, but my resistance to potential life changes seemed insurmountable. How could it possibly get better than it was right then?
Even then, though, I definitely knew things could improve drastically. That, and some of what made my then-current situation great were obviously transitory, and I was just having trouble accepting that. Over the last year my life has changed an incredible amount, and along with it, my views of what I want my life to be have changed. This was the part I thought I'd have trouble with; the fantasy, not reality. But here are some examples.
Shooting concerts has really gone to the back burner for me in the last year. This really, really freaked me out at first, and believe me, I still have moments of panic about it, but ultimately I realized that I shouldn't do things that don't make me happy, that I don't feel a burning passion for, and that take away from other parts of my life that are more important right now. My home life has become far more dear to me in the last year than in the past, and I guard that time so much more. I don't want to be out every night; it has no longer become worth it to me to spend 3 nights/week being treated like crap by snobby hipsters at the Rickshaw Stop. It is also true that past missteps have soured me toward bands somewhat.
My friend situation has changed drastically in the last year. I am back to my standard, default friend situation, which is that I have very few close friends in my immediate area, don't hang out with a particular group (ever), and lead a rather solitary life that way, but with tons of acquaintances (who I really like, but keep at arms length because I am afraid of intimacy/don't want to let people into my heart/etcetcetcetc). This is how it always ends up, and in the last year I've gone from gut-wrenching pain about it, to a peaceful acceptance. This is who I am, and this is how I've always been, and I realize that most people probably don't understand & think I'm a bad friend or that I don't care, and ... well, I can't make people understand. I am who I am. Obviously dealing with my trust issues is something I'm working on, and that's a legitimate criticism, but I'm tired of trying to fit in with a group of friends, because it always ends one way: with me eventually drifting to the outside.
On a related note, I've realized in the last year that its OK to let go of that when I see it, to not desperately try to save something that no longer exists. Things change, people make new friends, sometimes it just doesn't work anymore for an array of reasons, and that's fine. This has been a tough pill to swallow, but coming to terms with it has done wonders for my everyday peace of mind and happiness. Not that I don't still have my moments (thanks to social media, its hard to move on sometimes), but I've come a long way.
I feel overall like there is just not enough time in life to worry about things I can't change, or waste time freaking out in the moment when the moment is just that, nothing more. Worrying about my career is fine to the extent that it motivates me to figure out where I want to head in the future (not at all figured out, by the way, in case you were wondering, something that sent me into a panic one year ago), but not to the extent that it sends me into a death spiral of "omgggg my career is ruined if I'm not shooting concerts every night or if I take a break from something or if I take a break from shooting entirely." That's shortsighted thinking, and my budding ability to recognize that, and even to pull myself out of it, is totally new.
I often ask myself now, "When I am on my deathbed, will I regret worrying about this/getting upset about this/doing this/not doing this?" <----- guess what? It clarifies things a great deal. Try it sometime.
So in the end, I got exactly what I was told was coming, and whether that's because of the cosmos or because its a self-fulfilling prophecy scarcely matters. BOOM. ★
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