The Year That Changed the Math

2023 was a pivotal year for me. The kind that grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me, hard.

I left a company I had given 30 years of my life to, a place I had expected to retire from. I stepped away to re-focus. I spent a week snowboarding in Colorado with my family and took zero calls from the office. That was a first in at least 25 years.

From there the year ran like a roller coaster. I witnessed the Firefall at Yosemite and met a new friend along the way. I finally swam with humpback whales, a lifelong dream. And then, in less than four months, I lost two of my best friends. Monte Trumbull, mentor, fellow photographer, and like a second father to me, died suddenly of a heart attack. Shortly after, another close friend from my inner circle also passed unexpectedly from a heart attack. In a matter of months, two of the people who knew me best were gone.

I traveled for a while, but I wasn’t ready to fully retire. I took another role with a different company, in a much reduced capacity, hoping for better balance. The money and title I had worked so hard for had lost most of their appeal. Life is fragile, and I had traded too much time and attention on things that didn’t matter.

I needed more time with my family, adventures I had put off too long, and more of the things I love doing.

Like photography.
Like floating in the ocean in the middle of nowhere and listening to a humpback whale sing in the depths.
Like hearing my kids exclaim when they see stars in the backcountry for the first time, or freak out when an Alaskan brown bear saunters by without a care in the world.
Like hanging out of a helicopter to photograph lava flowing into the ocean.
Like the sound of silence as snow falls in the mountains.
Like riding a zodiac onto a beach with thousands of penguins and elephant seals so loud they rival a sports stadium.
Like coming face to face with an orca, or being charged by a playful southern right whale calf.

Suddenly these were the things that mattered most.

The signs had been there. I just hadn’t been willing to listen. I assumed they’d still be there tomorrow, whenever I had time.

I rounded out the year in South Georgia and Antarctica. I took my dad with me, and it was great watching him experience something he likely never would have done on his own. I had long assumed I couldn’t be gone from work that long until I retired, and that I’d travel with my photography friends someday. Life changes abruptly. Things that once felt certain fall away. Opportunities you thought you had forever can be gone in a blink.

So begins a new phase, one I’d been building toward for over 20 years. Keep banking the experiences and the memories. Keep building the portfolio. Someday I’ll have more time for photography and do more with it. Maybe that time is now. Maybe I’ll get bogged down again and postpone. I don’t know.

I’m not big on self-promotion or social media. Still, a couple of friends recently encouraged me to do more with my photography, independently, within about 24 hours of each other. I’m taking that as a nudge. After a year of extreme highs and extreme lows, I’m changing a lot of things. This is the first stage of a multi-year plan to do more with my photography. We’ll see where it takes me.

Update: I wrote most of this more than two years ago. Then life with my teenage boys took over. The adventure bug I’d installed in them early on flipped: instead of me pulling them along, they started dragging me, and I was just trying to keep up. Photography moved to the side. I’ll have time for that later… right? Now feels like the right time to focus on it again.

This journal is the first step in that longer plan.

And so, the pursuit begins.