The Path Forward – Part 4

Day 43 of 100, Hannover, Germany

I started writing this one almost 2 weeks ago, flashing by fields, towns, stations, borders, on our way from Denmark to Germany for the second time. Family calls, and the train journey soothes. Over the past week and a bit, I’ve been adding and adding to it, so it’s coming to you in parts.

Continued from yesterday.

So, no more. I’m not a professional photographer.

I don’t think I ever have been, although trying it out for size over the past couple of years has been a lovely, and mostly uplifting ride (for everything else, if not the pocket). And one I only fell into because people liked my ideas and my can-do-ness and trusted me with their projects.

I’ve been a professional web developer for a while though, and while it’s not my sun-and-moon-overriding-passion, I have a deep interest in it. And that interest works, sans the emotional entanglement that comes with a concept like passion, which is something I understand as overwhelming: an insatiable, unharnessed greed. It is not something I can rein, and making money, oiling the cogs of mundane sustenance, is very much a rational effort. If I followed my passion, it would destroy me.

But compelling interests are something else. I like, more than the markup-driven putting together of sites, the content shuffling, user experiencing, behaviour analysis thing that goes into putting together a website for someone. I’m good at it, because watching people and understanding why they do what they do, has been something I’ve done all my life. This particular facet of self is evident in the kinds of things I shoot too: I like watching people. Interacting with them on the other hand, I can take or leave.

The more social of you will be branding me creepy for that last statement, I know. But look to your quieter, inward-looking mates. Wondering about fellow members of the species in their infinite varieties is one of life’s greatest pleasures, and one which is absorbing enough that interacting while at it, is often an unwelcome distraction.

(Writing also requires this level of absorption, but only because finding words is difficult)