Creative Pondering

With my ADD brain, writing and photography can be tough ... and a lifeline

This will come as a shock to almost no one, but I’m easily distracted. That is, until I’m not.

The cover word for distraction, at least in my case, is pondering. I ponder a lot, never more so than in the past couple of years, and especially during the winter. There’s something about the cold weather, having a birthday in January and the PTSD of the holiday season that has always made me want to sit in a corner and drool incoherently until I hear whether Phil has seen his shadow.

Pondering also is my form of list making. I’ve never been the type of person to write down to dos and check off each item as it’s completed. In fact, it’s only when my brain is too overstuffed that I even bother to reboot with a hastily scrawled list.

As a writer who works for clients, there are times you have to plod through, even if that means pacing and taking part in other rituals — junk food, anyone? — in a desperate attempt to summon the freelance muse. Personal writing is another matter. I can’t begin to say how many starts have been left unfinished as self-doubt creeps in on whether these cerebral noodlings are worth your scroll time.

Some would call my pondering a lack of self-discipline or an excuse not to put structure into my life. I really can’t disagree with either assessment. I also know myself well enough to know that it’s unlikely things will change at this late date.

I’ve spent large chunks of my life wishing I was someone I’m not, seeking traits I admire but ultimately do not understand. I wish I knew how to build things like my grandfather. I wish I knew how to cook like my grandmother or my wife. I wish I could draw like my dad, sing like my children, or organize things like my mom.

I wish… Don’t we all?

At some point over the past decade, I switched from “wishing” to saying, “I’ll do me. You do you.” My work habits have been this way for so long that they’re engrained, and, at least in this case, familiarity breeds comfort. For me, envy and jealousy have given way to admiration and appreciation for the talents of others.

As a society, we don’t celebrate those talents enough. Instead, we find ourselves engaging in the playground bullying you see on social media.

Sad reality: Modern discourse has become the equivalent of class change in the middle school hallway, where your only hope is to be the person silently farting while you serpentine through the crowd.

Variants and Variations

When the pandemic began and the world moved into lockdown in March 2020, I started keeping a “Social Distancing Diary” that included images from my daily walks around Alexandria, Va. The diary continued steadily for more than a year, through my first dose of the COVID vaccine, and then intermittently for six months after that.

For a time, those walks taking pictures with my iPhone were a creative and psychological lifeline. The diary entries, which like this were posted to Facebook and Instagram, provided a sense of satisfaction from documenting what was happening in our world during such a contentious time.

The sudden grinding of the career gears, especially from a photography standpoint, left me unmoored, and the isolation forced on all of us by the pandemic served as an unwelcome flashback to feelings I had as a child. I didn’t want more time to think and reflect; I needed an outlet. And while limited, the phone camera forced me to focus on composition in a way I hadn’t since starting this second career.

For the diary, I took more than 2,000 images in 2020 and 2021, snapping the things that caught my eye during each of the four seasons. When I decided to end it in the summer of 2021, I had two sound reasons:

• I had shot so much on my walks between the Woodrow Wilson Bridge and Reagan National Airport (with a couple of trips into D.C.) that finding something new and different was getting harder and harder to do.

• More important, the world was starting to open up. As a result, I was shooting concerts and — occasionally — headshots and events again.

Like many of you, I was ready to move on to other things. But as we all know too well, life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans. Omnicron has made sure of that.

Recently, I started looking back through the images I took over the course of that year, wondering if there is a way to build a photography show or book featuring the diary entries. I’ve been working on a couple of personal writing projects for some time, including one that incorporates the diary entries into a memoir format, so that holds some promise. (Feedback is welcome on either project.)

January and February traditionally are down months in the freelance world, and despite a couple of writing and photo gigs, the variant hasn’t helped. At the same time, I started noticing different things on my well-trodden paths.

Interesting images were popping up, and so out came the iPhone again.

If you’d like to see the other images, go to my Facebook album here. (You don’t have to be on Facebook to see the photos.)

As always, thoughts and comments welcome.