Month: May 2013

Joy Postponed, Drudgery pwned

I wish I were posting today about my very successful trip to the Catskills to photograph a few beautiful waterfalls and their lush attending mountain forests. Alas I decided to postpone that jaunt due to the high degree of cloud cover predicted for the region. And so instead I’ve spent the weekend playing a few video games, running many miles and getting around to some business that had been eluding me. 

This is often the most difficult thing for me to accomplish. The tasks that were second tier but are allowed to move forward by a hiccup on the first tier. Plans are a wonderful thing for those of us who have spent more of our lives procrastinating than doing. And when those plans get disrupted I feel uniquely challenged by my desire to get things done anyway. Here I sit, in time I had slated for driving down from the hill country to the flat and sandy shores of Long Island, unable to do that thing from which I had already tasted the thrill and triumph. So how is it that one makes one’s way back from a daydream into the reality of useful drudge work? After all, my love for entering data about and pricing prints of my photographs is not what drives me to take them. Nor is applying for juried hangings of my work with local arts councils. The fact that I keep running into here is that there is simply no way to casually make my way back from that daydream, for this work is completely and utterly unrelated to the dreamscape. Instead this is a process of ringing the bell at the change of periods, rudely rousing myself and setting off to plod through a lab period, where daydreaming over a colorless lecture is not an option. The really good news here is that its hard to emerge from the lab without feeling energized. 

I do not, this evening, feel energized in the way that I would arriving home with a couple of CF cards from which will flow many additional hours of ecstatic work. Instead it is the slow and confident energy of preparedness. Necessary work was never my strong suit. This is me making a change, I suppose.