Slow dancing in the rain

I seem to have made a rather startling amount of progress over the weekend in uncluttering -- a very necessary but traditionally daunting task. What was most amazing this time was that although I was wobbly and exhausted after each day's progress, I was not triggered.

Photography is a thread that ties much of my life together. In Ohio, in Germany, in San Francisco, and often in Seattle, photography was a primary coping tool. In more recent blogging, I have photographed most of my serial perseverations, my intense interests.

Over the years it has usually been easier to go overboard on a primary interest and shunt others aside, some to be semi-forgotten, others to occasionally return to their place in the sun. the quiescent interests seem to always have a trigger risk -- particularly when the "overdoing" has been particularly egregious, or when I had felt particularly like I had found something that would give me enduring strength and entertainment.

Photography's thread might be piercing the barrier, the membrane, that forms as an interest fades. Without that piercing, a pressure differential can build until any effort to clean up the clutter risks puncturing that membrane and releasing a flood of triggers. The last few days, instead of floods of triggers, there there has been rue, and ennui, and some "wow, look at this, I should photograph some of this stuff."

At times, the transition from interest to interest has been a total break, often accompanied by (probably initiated by) a bout of severe depression. Sometimes it has been more of a segue from one to the other, with some carry-over. The latter seems to have been the case for the last several months. Progress?

Photography as a primary interest, and intense interest, may not endure this time any more than it has in the past, but my new understanding of how to relate it to my head stuff is showing dramatic benefit, and there seems great potential for building on that.

My last really good camera was stolen from my apartment a few years before Jo and I married. I have made do since then with low end cameras. That may have been a mistake. But not as large a mistake as letting photography's ebb & flow as an interest ebb quite so far. I have learned that sometimes I have to write things down to effectively communicate them from one part of my brain to another. It would seem that photography, beyond its other benefits, can play a similar role.