Here we are the end, which is also a beginning. I don’t know about you, but I am tired - not tired from doing so much as not doing. The holding back and holding on so tightly as things around us unravel. The virus, the marches, the politics, the deaths. It’s all a bit much to pack into a single year. Especially so, the reckoning of much of our own blindness to the oppression and violence faced by our neighbors. That is not a shame I carry lightly.
Even as I am on the whole quite well and gratefully employed, I know none of us will get out of 2020 unscathed. Our scars will be different, some will be far deeper than others. We will need to reconcile these demons for some time to come. There is grief in that, but also some resolution to lingering ideas. Things are sharper now for me. Perhaps that has to do with my being alone for so much of the year. My introverted heart did not really mind most of the alone time, but I will admit there were some dark stretches. And likely, some still to come. What I found was my own resilience. I am mighty resilient, but I am not superhuman. I need companionship the way others do, I’m just better now at packing it away and dealing with what is at hand. For today, anyway.
I’ve been turning lately to writings of the Stoics, which is a very bro-philosophy thing to do, but I find certain ideas take hold in different phases of our lives. The quote from Marcus Aurelius has stuck with me lately, and is what I set my focus on for 2021:
“Get active in your own rescue.”
There is no one coming to save me from myself, as it is work that I alone must do. There is no one to save us from ourselves but us. We alone must do the work. I just don’t want to do all of it alone. I want my old friends, bike friends and family with me. Happiness, grief, celebration, frustration, hope, work is all the more bearable when shared.
My photography life is not one to do alone anyway. It must be done with others, it must be for others as much as for myself. That is the life I look forward to returning to the most, after this “gap year,” as photographer Bruce Buckley so aptly named it. Our gap year may well extended much longer than a year, but we have learned some hard lessons on how to endure. And we will. I will. When it is finally time, I’ll meet you out there with a hug and a grin, and we won’t be alone.