Why yesterday will eat you alive (or How I let go of the past and embraced the potential of the future for the most part)

The clip and the clop clack their way through, as each day folds into the next. An unending blur in a whir that grows hazier by the day, until you’re left blind and deaf in the day’s din. But there are those times – those times when you stop dead in your tracks, and life ceases, your mind freezes, and you stand outside of yourself just long enough to check stock and take inventory. Sometimes, the world is like that. It gives you no choice. And far too frequently, I must confess, I have asked “Is this it?”

Maybe I can’t be more. Do more. Find more. “What if this is all there is?”

Silence answers me back. There’s nothing more than a distant yesterday, an unimaginable tomorrow, and me in this frozen moment, dark, still, and cold. Enough to rattle you, but so rarely enough to shake you free, eventually, the moment thaws, life calls, and the clip and the clop continue.

Of course, it wasn’t always this way.

My life as a photographer was born in the warm haze of inspiration. A sort of drippy, gushy feeling. Maybe it’s what it feels like when your heart comes alive. Maybe it’s the stars in alignment. Whatever it is, somehow, in that brief moment, I knew I had found more of me. Photography was my drug, and I could feel the high.

It’s fascinates me that this desire – something that started as nothing more than a way to pass the time and have some fun with that mysterious little black box – could burn so fiercely. We call it a hunger, and hunger is the right word. It’s no coincidence that we equate such passion with our most elemental and primal of needs. Once you get it into your system, you never really flush it out.

But like a drug, over time you can grow numb to its effects. The high is a little less high, the low is a little more low. The creativity starts to look a little less creative, and inspiration calcifies as you go through the motions, praying each time you do, that if you do it with enough verve, you’ll rekindle that lost flame.

And if you’ve made it your job, the cycle accelerates, as you find your creativity pitted against itself. When creativity defines you, change is oxygen, but when you double down and put your livelihood on the line, it’s formula that so often saves the day and puts food on the table.

It’s the most vicious of cycles. Inspiration defines you. Definition limits you. Hunger becomes sustenance. Passion becomes work.

You can never return to Eden. And, yet, the irony is neither do you need to leave. Life is the process of change, and we all do so, whether we like it or not. The question is whether you recognize this change.

You can never really be reduced to formula, though too often, we do just that in the face of unrelenting pressure and unending work. But if you can never go back, then how do you go forward?

The beauty of beginnings is the romance. We live anew, undefined, and unrestrained. There are no voices in your head telling you who you are, how it should be, and what you’re supposed to do. It’s a time of limitless potential, where the only question we need ask is how it can be. But, invariably, as things settle, and we learn the rules, learn our ways, and see the patterns, in the face of the pain we feel when we find our limits, we stop asking how it can be and we start saying how it should be.

And in the face of creativity, how-it-should-be is death. It is the triumph of fear over inspiration – a loss of the faith in the unknown that once gave us strength and a loss of the belief in tomorrow’s tomorrow.

We live by archetypes – fancy little models in our heads about how it’s supposed to all go down. In beginnings we don’t know enough to have them. In ends we know too much to steer clear. We’re filled with notions of how. How we should sit, how we should stand, what we should think, and, of course, how we should take our pictures. But the most damning of them all is knowing who we are. Because if we know who we are, then we just as readily must know who we are not – all the things we can’t do, won’t do, won’t accept, and don’t accept. This is the true loss of creativity.

It may be that knowing who you are is everything. But, if so, only in inclusion. Only when you remain willing to see the world with the newborn eyes, keep the doors open, and cradle the universe in your arms. When you know there’s no way you have to take your pictures, no way it has to be, when you revel instead of revile, then knowing who you are becomes as much an act of letting go as letting in. It’s allowing yourself to change and to follow the path to new conclusions.

Too often, we feel we aren’t measuring up – that we have failed – when in reality, we simply don’t see we’re on a different course. Emerson was right. It is indeed the journey and not the destination.

Each day, we live the journey, but the destinations will change. We do not have to follow the course charted by our younger selves. Yesterday’s rules were meant for yesterday. Today is a different ride. The course correction you need is not to realign the now with your past. It’s to realign your past with the now.

You are at your most brave and powerful in the silence. In the moments you check stock and take inventory and feel the hesitance and fear of an uncertain you. But we have to be willing to shed our own skins and crawl out of ourselves to fly. And while the path might be fraught with challenge and change and the sweat and blood of a hard-earned life, the message is clear. In this moment, as you read this, as you take your next picture, build your next life, and think about who you are, the true danger isn’t that you become someone else. It’s that you don’t accept who you are now.