Jeremiah Tolbert

Today is my 32nd birthday.

I can’t say that I’m happy about it.  But I’m com­ing to terms with it.

At this point in my life, birth­days for me are a reminder of my mor­tal­ity.  They ceased being about gifts when I was in my teens.  For a while in my col­lege years, I thought my birth­day was bad luck due to a string of nasty events around my birth­day, so I went out of my way to hide it from friends well into my late 20s.  I’m past that non­sense, but I still grow melancholy.

I wanted to do so much more with my life than I have.  It feels as if I have squan­dered the last ten years, even though I know this is not so.  I have some won­der­ful things to show for my time.  Nothing of seri­ous con­se­quence in the greater world, but… I am con­tent with this.

It’s time that instead of doing things to impress other peo­ple and draw atten­tion to myself out of some mis­guided sense that it would be a way of achiev­ing a kind of immor­tal­ity, I have instead deter­mined that I will attempt to ded­i­cate my remain­ing time towards liv­ing a life that I can look back on with­out regret.  As my old boss used to say, each day is a gift, and it is up to us how we use them. I have long squan­dered them on things that I will not remem­ber when my time comes to pass.

So today, in an attempt to live each day more fully, to con­nect more with the pas­sage of time and develop more of a sense of being here in the now, I am launch­ing my 365 day pho­tog­ra­phy project.   I am tak­ing and select­ing one pho­to­graph each day for the next year. There’s noth­ing orig­i­nal about it.  Many peo­ple have done these before, but I have not.   I  At times, I will exper­i­ment with new tech­niques. Sometimes, I will prob­a­bly not be able to get out of bed, and so I will be forced to find some inter­est­ing way of cap­tur­ing the ceil­ing of my bedroom.

If you all, the audi­ence, serves a pur­pose in this project, it is to keep me hon­est.  I find that when you do some­thing like this out in the open, you feel more ded­i­cated to the task.  I let myself down often enough, but it’s a moti­va­tor to avoid let­ting oth­ers down. Ultimately, how­ever,  this is a project I do for myself.  You’re wel­come to take plea­sure from the project, and I hope you do. But I’m doing this for so many more rea­sons than usual.

The 365 project can be found here. You can fol­low it on twit­ter here.

So that’s my pri­mary goal right now, on the road to turn­ing 33.  We’ll see how it goes.