If anything, it reminded me that my skill set is not only useful in the harsh, dramatic, exhausted, high-stress corners of the world. It can also be useful in bright morning light, under vendor tents, around families, coffee cups, smiling business owners, and kids wandering through a local market.

Because that is how time works. Every moment in life has already started disappearing by the time we notice it. The laugh is gone. The light has changed. The kid has turned away. The dog has moved. The person has wiped their face. The firework has burned itself out.

Which is usually how these things go. You start with a little too much confidence, bump into the part you didn’t know you didn’t know, and then suddenly your “quick repair” becomes an evening of muttering, rewatching the same tutorial, and wondering why a barrel adjuster has the emotional power to ruin your day.

Sometimes carrying the weight is not leadership.

Sometimes it is what you do when you are tired, frustrated, and trying to prove a point instead of doing your actual job.

That transfers directly into creative work, production, management, and pretty much any team environment where the leader is also highly capable of doing the work.

Things might be going well for a while. The plan is in motion. People know what they’re supposed to do. Everyone is moving.

Then the trap starts loading itself.

Every shaft of light is b-roll. Every quiet moment is a possible frame. Every small piece of beauty or humanity becomes something you can use, shape, shoot, edit, or build into something bigger.

Maybe this is too “old man yells at cloud” (it almost certainly is), but I think part of our overall frustration with the digital world isn’t that we’re just existing digitally. We’re existing digitally while we view digital representations of people that don’t feel like people anymore. They’re electronically modified to fit into preconceived windows of time where we think we’ll either keep people around for viewership or readership or lose them completely.

Because when they hear, “$3,000 for you to stand with a camera for 8 hours,” they really hear, “I’m expensive and hard to justify, blah blah blah.” And this is just for shooting, not even editing, where things can really start to add up.

“If you want to make progress, put up with being thought foolish and simpleminded about outward things. Don’t yearn to be regarded as any kind of expert. Even if others take you to be a person of some importance, doubt yourself.”

The first day that Ripley met Colby.

I’m back to rucking, and it leaves me with a lot of time to think.

A short story about a sunrise summit hike - part of a series of personal workshops to practice creative writing after a decade+ of not really doing so.