3 6 5

Starting September 27, 2008: one photo per day accompanied by prevailing thoughts, moods, or feelings on that day.

July 21, San Mateo, CA: I cruised along today, working at home. And was pretty efficient. One of these days I’m going to work from home (really) and actually leave the house. Tonight I had a photo backup issue to deal with, and it meant that I had to finally go through my old images and delete the ones that I would clearly have no use for in the future. But it also meant that I had to look at pictures from my last relationship. I had been avoiding doing that. In fact, I have been so reluctant that when the images on my iPhone come up on screen in my photo library management software (each time I plug in my phone to charge), I actively avoid looking at them. I had removed lots of them from my various sites, but I hadn’t removed them from my master libraries at home. To be honest, the photographer in me cannot stand the thought of removing the best work…it sounds like sacrilege, actually. But that’s only about 5% of the total. So I looked at them. And I deleted them. And it was hard. Very hard. I’m still looking forward to the time when I can reference those times without reliving them emotionally (or maybe some measure of emotion promotes self-honesty about whether or not you are repeating the same mistakes. I don’t know). I mentioned to my girlfriend that when I think about getting to that point, it reminds me of the anecdote about going from point A to point B by cutting the remaining distance in half with each step, with two implications: first, you never actually get to point B….but you get DAMN close. And that just needs to be ok. Second…at some point you reach diminishing returns and no matter what you do or how much time passes, you can only make the tiniest bit of progress. So all that seems to say that if the conditions are *just* right, there is always going to be the possibility that something could create an emotional response about the past. I’m guessing that it becomes less and less likely. I think I have made lots progress, but I accept that time is the only way to reach that asymptote.

298 / 365

July 21, San Mateo, CA: I cruised along today, working at home. And was pretty efficient. One of these days I’m going to work from home (really) and actually leave the house. Tonight I had a photo backup issue to deal with, and it meant that I had to finally go through my old images and delete the ones that I would clearly have no use for in the future. But it also meant that I had to look at pictures from my last relationship. I had been avoiding doing that. In fact, I have been so reluctant that when the images on my iPhone come up on screen in my photo library management software (each time I plug in my phone to charge), I actively avoid looking at them. I had removed lots of them from my various sites, but I hadn’t removed them from my master libraries at home. To be honest, the photographer in me cannot stand the thought of removing the best work…it sounds like sacrilege, actually. But that’s only about 5% of the total. So I looked at them. And I deleted them. And it was hard. Very hard. I’m still looking forward to the time when I can reference those times without reliving them emotionally (or maybe some measure of emotion promotes self-honesty about whether or not you are repeating the same mistakes. I don’t know). I mentioned to my girlfriend that when I think about getting to that point, it reminds me of the anecdote about going from point A to point B by cutting the remaining distance in half with each step, with two implications: first, you never actually get to point B….but you get DAMN close. And that just needs to be ok. Second…at some point you reach diminishing returns and no matter what you do or how much time passes, you can only make the tiniest bit of progress. So all that seems to say that if the conditions are *just* right, there is always going to be the possibility that something could create an emotional response about the past. I’m guessing that it becomes less and less likely. I think I have made lots progress, but I accept that time is the only way to reach that asymptote.