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new year's eve in athens: the view from pendeli mountain towards ymittos.
as we progress through life, we tend to ignore our surroundings, navigating through life based on prior experience instead of taking in information anew, selectively noticing only that which we have never before encountered. i suppose it's a basic strategy of survival, helping our species endure in an otherwise bewildering environment… at the same time, it is one of our properties that we sometimes need to defy.
imagine that your life is the length of the sidewalk of a city block… at first you're in the beginning of it, then the middle and soon you will be at the end.* how do you make every step worthwhile? i honestly don't know… but suspect i've found some clues.
appreciate immense scale by looking up at the sky and peer down at the smallest beings. get a fresh perspective by finding a spot to gaze across great distances across a city or a landscape or the sea. observe the simplest but wondrous tools that bring an unprecedented quality of life. venture to a new place on the planet and see how things can be confusingly different yet exactly the same. consider the wonders of science, simple and complex, that help you achieve the extraordinary, communicate with people across the globe and discover the profoundest of secrets of the cosmos. have fun!! learn or do something that you've never before attempted. search out heart-wrenching art and writing that moves you to elation and tears. feel compassion for every single human being around you, every fellow traveler in life who is just trying to make sense of it all, each in his or her own way. have a lingering look at your home, family, and friends… cherish them because tomorrow -- and i do mean, literally, tomorrow -- you may not have them anymore.
each of us has arrived in an infinitely exciting universe, against astronomical odds, for a brief moment in infinite time. none of us should waste it... not a single day. there is nothing that is boring -- there is nothing that might not provoke the deepest awe.
a year ago i wondered how i could possibly find 365 interesting things to shoot -- how silly i was. i've revisited the mundane and amplified my perception. i've felt exuberant inspiration and abysmal grief. i'm indebted to family and friends, old and new, who not only put up with my obsession -- but wisely encouraged me.
and all because i decided to pick up a camera.
my 365 project
a year ago today, from the same area: yearbreak
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* "now imagine these two characters, named christine (miranda july) and richard (john hawkes) as they walk down the street. she suggests that the block they are walking down is their lives. and so now they are halfway down the street and halfway through their lives, and before long they will be at the end. it is impossible to suggest how poetic this scene is; when it's over, you think, that was a perfect scene, and no other scene can ever be like it.' - roger egbert, a review of 'me and you and everyone we know'"
