Formosa Metal Pig

26th April 2011

Post reblogged from see . ruzz . org with 10 notes

long time running (reblogged with permission)

For my own edification, as I appreciate the self-examination Ruzz details with regards to his upcoming 40th birthday. I also have empathy for his desire to draw the proverbial line in the sand once that day approaches.

see-ruzz:

okay. so here’s the thing. i’m encouraged by spring enthusiasm to try to make some changes and there’s been a confluence of things in my life lately which are all giving me tiny day-dreams about what those changes might look like. the picture becomes clearer for me every day but i still have to overcome inertia. 

i’ve battled with inertia most of my adult life, i suppose. call it a character flaw, or a talent but I’m able to withstand and tolerate nearly anything for exceptionally long periods of time. a lot of times this is to my own detriment. take smoking for example, or staying here in this shithole because it’s safe, or staying in tech because it’s got earning power, or staying closed till my plum broke me open. the list is really long. I’m sure you have a list like that somewhere yourself. 

I have a secondary motivator which is closing in on me much faster than I’m comfortable with. my 40th birthday approaches and with it comes some self-made line in the sand about life. when you get to here, maybe because of my brush with my own mortality a couple years ago, you start to be able to see your own end in a more tangible way. I can see that i have a window of health, and strength and energy that is going to close up over the next 20-25 years (if i’m lucky).

that seems sort of odd to think of 20-25 years as a short block of time when in fact it’s quite massive. What changes it is the ability to concretely know how much time that is. When you’re 25 you can’t really get your head around that timeframe because the timeframe is your entire life.

I feel i awakened into real consciousness when i was about 14. thats when I started seeing the world around me as a distinct thing rather than a subject in my story. that means I’ve been consciously awake for 25 years. I can sit here and recall that span of time and play with it in my head and comprehend what it is. It’s still a massive swath of time but I can comprehend it’s passing. which puts a fine point on the next 25 years, which are what separate me from being a senior citizen (which is not necessarily a dead part of your life—but given how I treat this heaving body I consider just making it to 65 alive a bit of a dream). 

Having been afforded a view of a quarter century of change in modern life and myself, and the conscious weight the next 25 years, I feel like i’m in a unique position in my life to actively make some big changes and the last 6 months, particularly this winter, have given me at least one thing: clarity of purpose and a deep look at what matters to me.  

i’ve got some large collections of fears that have accumulated over time and when they combine with the power of habit, and the complacency of comfort, the outcome is always very small gains over very long blocks of time. You couple that with all the ways in which we prop ourselves up through distraction, procrastination, and self-deception and you have a recipe for stasis. 

there is only one thing i’ve learnt as an absolute truth about life over 39 years of living:

life is motion

the more like life you become the more life you live. the more agile and fluid, the more flowing and following, the more deeply exposed you become to areas of life that you can’t even conceive of sitting in your chair trying to guess what your life can hold. if you become motion, you become integrated to life. thats it. thats all i’ve learnt in nearly 40 years. 

of course that one learning displaces it’s fair share of other ideas because it’s pretty huge. It displaces a need to be right (which is the modern blight), the need to be unique or special (because your life is unique and special in a real way), there’s a lot more but I don’t want to get sidetracked.

i feel like when I was starting out in photography, I learnt several things about life around photography and how to relate to it. I made deep habits about the entire photographic process that are seeded in those first couple years of learning. I built a core habit of shooting-editing-sharing which remains today. I learnt habits of collecting visual information en masse with only on the spot discrimination because thats all the powers of discrimination i had available to me.  

so i developed the habit of going somewhere, walking around with a camera pushed up to my eye and firing off pictures as I saw interesting things (or more often interesting light) and then returning home, weeding out the ones that didn’t work, enhancing the ones that did, and then sharing through the various sites the results of all that then rinsing and repeating. 

which is what you need to do when you’re learning new technology and new concepts. you need to build habits that keep things moving through from start to finish regularly to give your curiosity a wide berth, and give your eye a chance to learn the relationship between what it saw in real life, what it saw in the viewfinder/lcd, what it saw one the computer and what it sees at the final version (if you have the balls to have a final version). 

when you’re learning a new language you don’t start by writing deeply complex poems that exploit the relationships of words. you have basic conversations as often as you can. when you’re starting woodworking you don’t start trying to craft fine detail in a delicate chess set. you make bookshelves and coffee tables. you do the simplest thing that you can to develop a comfort level with the tools, the materials, and to internalize the rote parts of that particular field of study.

as your understanding grows you can begin to introduce more refined tools and complexity to your work but that will only take you so far. there comes a time where you have to surrender what you’ve been doing and re-approach it entirely. you have to give up the habits you’ve made and the conceits you afford yourself and take what you’re doing from a trade to a craft.

thats what i want to do with the next 5 years. I want to revamp my entire relationship to photography and build a life and context that supports me in practicing a craft rather than going through my well established routines, with the hope I can spend the remaining 20 years of that quarter century producing what i hope will be my life’s work.

at this moment I’m refusing to imagine what that work will look like in any way. mostly because I don’t believe I’m able to imagine it. I don’t believe i have the mental tools available to predict that without a lot of conceit.

The truth is i spend some portion of every day in pain. Visceral, active pain that takes me away from myself. takes me away from the things I care about and it’s a certainty in my mind that even if i take every step I can now to improve that it’s unlikely i will get to my 65th birthday and be one of those spry, energetic seniors who make 65 look young. I’m consistently making 39 look old already and the reality of 25 years of sitting at a computer ensures crippling arthritis. the major health tramas of car accidents and life threatening infections, and the combined impact of being over-weight my entire life make it pretty clear 65 and healthy enough to do the work i want to do is a bit of a wistful dream on my part.  maybe i’m wrong about that. maybe i can make changes that alter the outcome but thats how it looks right now and that underlines for me the point that the time to start this process of change is now.

so what’s that even mean?

step one is removing the crutches i use to hide from my own depth. finding and quashing the habits i’ve accumulated over the years that give support to the lie that what i’m living right now is what i want to be living.

this website is one of those things, i’m afraid. 

step two is a purification by fire. I’m going to start a broad-fire in my physical world. burning up anything and everything that anchors rather than supports me. this means a huge move to minimalism in possessions, and financial requirements.

step three is addressing my health situation square on to find better ways to manage my pain and get in physical shape that will allow me to explore the world better. You can’t even imagine what doors in life are closed to you when you carry around a laundry list of special needs due to some ongoing health issue. those doors need to be open. 

step four is refactoring my income and breaking away from tech somehow. thats going to be the hardest of all the parts but one that’s been following me around for several years. I have a few ideas how to start that process but it’s going to take a lot of creativity and finding ways to make photography make money for me without going the route of wedding photographer, or commercial photographer, which i know wouldn’t make me happy. 

step five is to break the gravity of this city and use the things afforded by the first several steps to decide where i want to be in the world to do that work. Can you imagine Edward Weston’s work if he hadn’t been in the richness of the pacific coast? or Ansel Adams if he’d been in Toronto? Where you live matters. 

this is going to be a massive challenge. I quite possibly will fail. i quite possibly will have to eat crow for daring to want this and being stupid enough to put it out there for the haters to use against me later, or worse to use it against myself later, but i know one thing for certain, this life i’m living is not giving me what i need, and not supporting the parts of me that i care about. If i fail, i fail. it’s just an outline of what i want right now based on right now. the key tenant is to be fluid. to be agile, light, and able to follow life as she moves and changes and meet whatever she offers up squarely. 

some Q&A with my imaginary audience who made it this far without going, oh that ruzz. he needs help. 

what’s going to become of this blog?

it dies. it dies today (and gets removed May 1). I’m going to be burning anything that was shot before today on to dvd and storing it out of my reach. purging all my previous work from my hands forcing me to make new work, but also making a symbolic break between then, and now. 

i’m also going to be breaking the market induced cycle of shoot/edit/share. and this blog was built for sharing pictures. 

so what the eff, ruzz?

yeah, i know. right? you folks have been so good to me. putting up with my mood swings and offering encouragement, and connecting to my work and i hate to lose this connection with you just because i want to step off the treadmill. I realize i will lose lots of you because many of you just want eye candy. For those of you who want more, but can live with less images, i’m going to provide you with two new websites. 

more websites? how is that becoming more agile?

well, first off, I’m going to shutter any of my existing websites that aren’t in line with this process. so there will be less websites in total. but secondly, I’m going to clarify things a lot by giving strong direction to what those remaining two websites are for which i hope translates into less diddling around and wheel spinning and more focus.

so what are the websites then?

let me explain the roles they play first.

the first website will be geared towards photographers and people interested in photography. that is, people who are interested in the technical and the life of being a photographer. it will be links and essays and reviews and that sort of stuff. 

the second website will be about this journey from the life i have now, to the life i want. there will be few pictures, there will be no comments, no likes, no interaction on your part but reading if you’re so inclined. 

the links, which lead to nothing of value right now because i’ve been here writing you this damned blog are:

the photographic life 

a manifest beauty

for those of you who want to stay in touch send your details to this email address (babydontleaveme@zedzed.biz) where i’ve set up a temporary email off my old company url. I will hit you back from my personal email address so we can stay in communication. I’ll be killing that email addy May 1 when I kill this site as well so act now! haha. 

 its been fun kids. thanks for putting up with me. 

Source: see-ruzz