Announcing JT365
Filed Under: Photography, creativity, personal
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.
