Advanced Porch Sitting

A Gentle Rebellion Against the Cult of Productivity

As a recent retiree, one of my favorite pastimes is sitting on my front porch in a rocking chair, watching the phenomenal world quietly unfold. I have nowhere to be. Nothing to accomplish. No problem to solve. Nothing to fix. The rocking chair sways. The breeze wanders through the trees. A wren lands on the railing. Shadows slowly migrate across the yard as if time itself has decided to loosen its grip.

Mostly I’m daydreaming—that curious state where the eyes remain open but the mind begins to drift inward. My gaze rests gently on the neighborhood without becoming attached to it, while somewhere beneath awareness another landscape slowly reveals itself.

When I was working full-time, I often reproached myself for sitting on the porch. Surely I should be doing something productive. In a culture that measures our worth by our output, porch sitting can appear to be the very definition of wasted time.

But the purpose of porch sitting isn’t really to discover what’s happening in the neighborhood. It’s to discover what’s happening in me.

It is surprisingly easy to spend a lifetime overidentifying with our thoughts while rarely making space to truly listen to them. So much of who we are circulates beneath the surface—old joys and quiet griefs, forgotten hopes, unanswered questions, intuitions waiting patiently to be welcomed. Even after sixty-eight years, I continue to discover unexplored rooms within myself. The deeper life doesn’t usually emerge under interrogation. It prefers an invitation.

If I do this porch-sitting thing well, the gentle rhythm of rocking back and forth becomes its own form of listening. So much happens in a single day—even in retirement—that I never fully digest. Conversations linger. Memories resurface. Gratitude arrives unexpectedly. On the porch, life slowly settles like snow in a glass globe, and what was once swirling begins to come into focus.

Perhaps there is a reason rocking has accompanied human life for millennia. Parents instinctively rock their infants long before they understand language. We sway when we sing. In Jewish tradition, many worshipers gently sway while praying or studying Torah, allowing the body to participate in attention. In other contemplative traditions, rhythmic walking, bowing, or chanting serves a similar purpose—not because these practices are identical, but because they share an ancient intuition: the body can help quiet the mind, and gentle movement can become a doorway to presence.

Many of my better insights—I use “better” intentionally—seem to appear only after I’ve stopped chasing them. Apparently, they don’t like being pursued.

They emerge when I surrender the need to be purposeful and instead trust the quiet creativity of simply being here. Porch sitting has become a small act of resistance against a culture of relentless productivity and a gentle vote in favor of paying attention. For me, it is not an escape from life. It is one of the ways I learn to inhabit it more fully.

Of course, if anyone asks what I’m doing out there for an hour every afternoon, I’ll simply tell them I’m engaged in advanced porch sitting—an ancient contemplative practice. It sounds much more respectable than admitting I’m mostly watching squirrels negotiate real estate disputes while my rocking chair quietly rocks me back to myself.

Where Love Gets Dirty

What One Monk Taught Me About Love

Shortly after graduating from divinity school, I spent two weeks at Holy Savior Priory, an Anglican Benedictine monastery just outside Charleston, South Carolina. It was a place where life moved at a different pace. The day was measured not by appointments or deadlines, but by bells calling the community to prayer. Even the ordinary work seemed to carry the quiet dignity of worship.

One afternoon I was working in the barn when I realized my college class ring had slipped from my finger. Earlier, I had been hauling wheelbarrow loads of straw, manure, grass clippings, and kitchen scraps to the compost pile behind the guest house. If the ring had fallen anywhere, it was there.

The afternoon light was beginning to soften, and before long the bell would ring for Vespers. Frustrated, I climbed into the compost pile and began searching through layers of damp grass, vegetable peelings, eggshells, and yesterday's forgotten meal, hoping to catch the glint of gold.

What I didn't know was that Father Gill, one of the older monks, had been watching quietly from the kitchen window. A few moments later he walked over, smiled gently, and said, "It appears you have lost something." I explained what had happened. Without another word, he removed his white hooded habit, folded it neatly to one side, stepped into the compost beside me, and began searching.

For the next half hour we sifted through the pile together. We searched patiently, turning over handful after handful of what everyone else had thrown away. Neither of us said very much. There was only the quiet companionship of two people sharing the same search.

We never found my class ring. But over the years I've come to realize that perhaps I wasn't the one who had lost something that day. Father Gill wasn't helping me recover a ring. He was teaching me how to love.

Until then, I imagined love as saying the right words, offering wise advice, or solving another person's problems. Father Gill revealed another way.

Love steps into another person's compost pile.

Love doesn't remain safely at the edge, offering instructions about the mess. It enters it. It gets its hands dirty. It chooses presence over solutions, companionship over explanations. It is willing to stand in the places that smell of disappointment, grief, fear, failure, and uncertainty simply because someone else should not have to stand there alone.

I've long since forgotten what that class ring looked like.

But I have never forgotten the sight of an elderly monk quietly removing his white habit, stepping into the compost beside me, and searching as though my loss had become his own.

I have come to believe that this is where love does its finest work. Not from a safe distance.

But in the messy, complicated places where human lives are lived.

The Myth of Other People’s Lives

As we grow older, there is one aspect of life about which we remain surprisingly uninformed: how our inner lives compare with the lives we imagine everyone else is living.

Our frustrations, disappointments, regrets, and grief become heavier because we tend to imagine that we carry more of them than most people do. We quietly assume that everyone else has somehow figured life out while we alone are still stumbling through it. We suffer not only because life is difficult, but because we mistakenly believe our difficulties are unusual.

In the middle of the night, the mind becomes a terrible statistician. We convince ourselves that no one could have made as many bone-headed decisions as we have, that few families have endured as much misunderstanding or conflict, that no sensible person could have mishandled money quite so spectacularly, or found themselves wondering if they have somehow fallen behind everyone else.

My electric utility company sends me a monthly neighbor comparison report. It compares my home’s energy use with that of “efficient neighbors” living nearby. In theory, it’s a helpful feature. In practice, my household almost always comes up short. Then I wave politely to the people across the street as they roll their recycling bins to the curb, secretly convinced they are judging both my carbon footprint and my character. Their imagined smugness is almost comical.

It has made me wonder what other comparison reports I wish existed.

What if, once a month, we received a confidential report showing how our lives compared with those of our neighbors—not their carefully edited public lives, but their real ones? We might discover that our doubts, our disappointments, our strained relationships, our financial worries, our lingering grief, and our unanswered questions fall almost exactly within the expected range of ordinary human experience.

We spend so much of our lives longing to be “normal,” by which we usually mean happier, more successful, more financially secure, more emotionally together. Yet perhaps normality is not the absence of sorrow but its quiet companionship. Perhaps what is most ordinary is not confidence but uncertainty, not perfection but regret, not certainty but the daily work of beginning again.

Our lives are wonderfully beautiful and undeniably messy. We need not add to our burdens by imagining that our struggles are unique. Behind nearly every front door—and certainly behind every Facebook profile—is a story of hidden courage, private heartbreak, and unfinished healing.

The sadder truths of our neighbors surround us on every side, though we rarely speak of them.

In the end, perhaps the most ordinary thing about us is not our success, but our shared longing to be seen, understood, and loved despite the beautiful mess of our lives.

The Shore Beyond the Mist

At sixty-eight, I imagined the horizon would be easier to read. I thought age would bring a certain clarity, that the distant shore would finally come into focus. Instead, much of it remains veiled in mist. The future is still there—I can sense its outline—but its details remain hidden from view. The final chapters of my life remain shrouded in mystery. I also assumed that by now I would be wiser—more settled, more emotionally mature, more at peace with myself.

Yet wisdom, I have discovered, is not a destination one reaches. It is something one returns to, again and again, often after wandering far from home.

Not so much in matters of contemplative practice or photography. I know most of what I need to know there. The deeper lessons are older, simpler, and infinitely harder to live. They concern forgiveness and fearlessness, the willingness to be broken open by beauty, and the courage to keep saying yes to life despite its griefs and cruelties. They concern making room for silence, paying attention, and finding grace in the ordinary gifts that surround us—a perfect peach, a ripe avocado on the kitchen counter, sunlight pooling on a wooden floor, the face of someone we love. None of these teachings are particularly complicated. The challenge is remembering them.

The challenge is allowing them to sink beneath the intellect and become part of the body, part of the breath, part of the way we move through the world.

Great photographs continue to remind me of this. The work of Sally Mann and Carrie Mae Weems, among so many others, returns me to truths I am forever forgetting: that love is worth the risk, that wonder often waits close to home, that joy is not frivolous but essential, that cynicism is a poverty of imagination, and that our lives become smaller when we spend them seeking the approval of others. The photographs that linger with me do not merely show the world; they invite me back into it. They remind me that magic is rarely found elsewhere. More often, it is waiting in our own backyard, our own neighborhood, our own kitchen, patiently hoping we will notice.

With whatever time remains, I find myself wanting to take another look at the world. I want to stand before it with fewer assumptions and greater tenderness. I want to photograph everything that catches the light of my attention. I want to tell my friends how deeply I love them. I want to throw my arms around my beautiful family so often that they eventually laugh and tell me I’ve made my point. I want to linger a little longer over conversations, sunsets, poems, and ordinary afternoons. I want to become more available to astonishment.

Death, I know, is somewhere in the neighborhood. It always has been. My balance is uncertain. I cannot hear out of my left ear. Osteoarthritis has taken up residence in my body. I have accumulated a lifetime’s worth of mistakes. I have been stubborn when I should have been flexible, guarded when I should have been open, and I have carried certain hurts longer than they deserved.

Yet something bright remains. Something curious. Something unbroken. Each morning my body reminds me of its limitations, but each morning the world continues to offer itself—the call of a bird before dawn, the slant of light through a window, the kindness of a friend, clouds gathering over distant hills. The invitation to live has not been withdrawn.

And so I find myself wanting to begin again—not from the beginning, but from here. To walk more slowly. To notice more carefully. To love more extravagantly. To live more gratefully. There is still beauty here. There is still mystery. There is still time. Not forever, of course, but enough. Enough for one more conversation, one more photograph, one more act of kindness, one more season of astonishment.

Across the water, the far shore remains hidden in mist. For now, it is enough to stand here in wonder, grateful for the light, the water, and the mystery between.

Thank You, Sam

Tomorrow morning, Heidi and I will accompany our beloved dog, Sam, to the edge of this life and say goodbye.

For months, cancer has been quietly reshaping her world. We have watched her body grow tired and her steps become uncertain. Yet through it all, she has remained herself—gentle, faithful, and full of love.

One of the sorrows of loving an animal is that, sooner or later, we may be asked to make a decision that breaks our own hearts. It is easy to wonder if we are doing the right thing.

But when I sit quietly with that question, I come back to this: this decision is not about control. It is about compassion. If I were carrying the pain that Sam now carries, I would hope someone loved me enough to let me rest.

Today, we are practicing gratitude.

Gratitude for muddy paws, morning walks, quiet companionship, and the countless ordinary moments that became precious because she was there. Tomorrow our hearts will ache. But beneath the grief is a deep thankfulness for having been entrusted with this remarkable soul for a little while.

Thank you, Sam. You have been one of the great blessings of our lives.

May your suffering be at an end. May you know only peace.

Playing Among the Rubble

Many works of art begin with a wound.

They invite us into rooms filled with loneliness, anxiety, estrangement, and loss. They ask us to linger beside what is broken, both in the world and within ourselves. We have become so accustomed to this way of seeing that it can feel almost like the artist’s sacred duty: to uncover the hidden sorrow beneath the surface of things.

And perhaps this is necessary. Suffering deserves a witness. Grief deserves a language. The shadows deserve their share of attention.

But not every truth lives in the shadows.

I have spent years admiring photographers such as Martine Franck, Fred Herzog, William Eggleston, Minor White, and Thomas Merton. Much of their celebrated work—with perhaps the exception of Merton—probes the loneliness, anxiety, ambiguity, and quiet dislocation woven through everyday life. Their images remind us that beneath the surface of ordinary existence lies a deeper, often more complicated story.

Yet when I created this photograph at the Malik Ghat Flower Market in Kolkata, India, I found myself drawn toward something else.

Three little boys were playing among piles of rubble, only a few feet from the colorful, intoxicating, bewildering chaos of the market itself—a world overflowing with tuberoses, roses, and marigolds destined not for dining room tables, but for temple offerings. Around them was noise, commerce, devotion, beauty, and disorder. Yet in the midst of it all, they were simply playing.

When I pressed the shutter, I wasn’t trying to expose a hidden wound. I was trying to preserve a glimpse of something easily overlooked: joy surviving in unlikely places, innocence persisting amid complexity, tenderness emerging from apparent disorder.

This image will never hang in a museum. It will never be offered for sale. In some ways, it is a shy self-portrait—an indirect attempt to say that the most bewildering aspects of my personality, those that so often occupy center stage, are not the whole story.

I seriously doubt that most of my friends suffer from having too rosy a view of themselves or of others. Most of us have little difficulty recognizing our shortcomings, our failures, our fears, or the ways we have fallen short of our own hopes. The more urgent task, it seems to me, is rescuing the smaller and more fragile parts of ourselves: the hidden capacities for tenderness, kindness, wonder, generosity, and simple decency.

We long for others to see those parts of us. We long for them to be known and cherished. Yet they are easily bruised, and so we often keep them tucked away from view.

Which is why there is something quietly liberating about this photograph.

It reminds me that beneath the rubble—beneath the anxieties, uncertainties, ambitions, disappointments, and carefully constructed identities—there remains a small child who still wants to play. And perhaps that is true for all of us.

Somewhere beneath the noise and confusion of our lives, something small and tender is still at play.

The Quiet Beauty of Ordinary Life

In the contemplative photography classes I teach, we often explore how beauty quietly manifests in the ordinary, mundane, and everyday world. As children, we knew this instinctively. With childlike curiosity, we expected to be surprised by color, light and shadow, texture, shapes and forms, and patterns. The world felt alive with discovery simply because we were fully present to it.

Many of my students initially arrive with a strong interest in the technical aspects of photography — cameras, lenses, composition, exposure, sharpness, and editing. And while these things certainly matter, something beautiful often begins to happen over time. They gradually discover that contemplative seeing itself is what allows us to truly connect with the beauty around us.

Instead of constantly hunting for images or worrying about technical perfection, we begin learning the ancient art of receiving what has always been there. We slow down enough for the world to reveal itself. In contemplative photography, the universe is not inert or lifeless. It has agency. It is continually offering us moments of surprise, wonder, tenderness, and presence — if only we are quiet enough to notice.

As we grow older, however, we begin to assume that our particular ideas about beauty are fixed and universal, when in fact they are fluid, cultural, and constantly changing. At any given moment, there are far more varieties of beauty in the world than a particular culture or period of history is willing to recognize. There is beauty in steam rising from a morning cup of coffee, in a beam of light slipping through the curtains at dawn, and in Black-eyed Susans and Queen Anne’s lace lining a quiet rural road. And yet we often move past these moments without truly seeing them.

Part of the difficulty is that many of us lose contact with the phenomenal world — the world received directly through the senses — unless someone helps reveal it to us again. Art has always served this purpose. Throughout history, artists have used attention, skill, and imagination to help others notice forms of beauty that might otherwise have been overlooked or dismissed.

Perhaps this is one of the quiet gifts of contemplative practice: it gently returns us to a state of openness and curiosity. It reminds us that beauty is not reserved for the spectacular or extraordinary. Much of it lives quietly around us — and within us — waiting to be noticed.

The image I chose for this post was created in Agra, in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. There is beauty here in the ordinary dignity of a human life quietly being lived. The beauty is not dramatic or ornamental. It lives in the stillness of the moment — an elderly man seated in a worn doorway, absorbed in reading the newspaper. Nothing appears staged. Nothing is trying to impress us. And yet the image carries a deep sense of presence, tenderness, and humanity.

As I continue learning how to slow down and pay attention, I find myself more and more expecting beauty to appear in ordinary places — and surprisingly, it almost always does. I hope you’ll join me in looking a little more carefully at the world around you this week. In anxious and restless times such as these, learning to notice and document beauty may be one of the quiet ways we begin to heal our hearts and reconnect with a sense of child-like curiosity and wonder.

What Rayond and Lucy Knew

Most of my strategies for remaining calm and serene once depended upon reassuring myself—and others—that the worst-case scenarios would never come to pass. But lived experience has taught me something different. Contentment is not found in denying the possibility of storms, but in learning to trust that we can endure them.

I have learned this slowly, through trial and error, and by making my own fair share of mistakes over the course of my life—mistakes whose consequences can still make me shiver when I think about them too long. And yet, even those failures have become teachers. Over time, I have come to see that some of our deepest disappointments are not interruptions of the journey, but part of the journey itself. With support, honesty, and compassion, even wounded places can soften into sources of wisdom.

Perhaps wisdom lies not in pretending storms will never come, but in quietly preparing for them. When the winds begin to howl and the rain comes sideways, fear can narrow the horizon and convince us that everything is falling apart. But fear is not always a trustworthy narrator.

I often think of my grandparents on my mother’s side, Raymond and Lucy, who lived in the Southern Appalachians, survived the Great Depression, and later sent sons off to war with no guarantee they would ever return home. Like so many families across Appalachia and throughout the United States during those years, they lived through severe poverty, uncertainty, food insecurity, and economic hardship. They understood instability in ways many of us have been spared. And yet they continued forward—working, loving, grieving, praying, and caring for those around them as best they could.

When I remember Lucy and Raymond, I am reminded that human beings are far more resilient than fear would have us believe. We forget how much strength has already been placed within us through sorrow, friendship, resilience, and the care of those who have walked beside us. And we forget the simplest truth of all: after even the longest night, dawn still comes.

There is usually far more courage within us than we can remember in difficult seasons. Perhaps we should hold more lightly the expectation of a smooth and untroubled life. There will be detours. There will be losses. We may need to stop along the way and steady ourselves before continuing on. But this is not failure. It is part of being human.

At this stage of my life, I would not say that I have mastered the art of living. But perhaps I have learned something quieter and more forgiving: how to limp my way, with a little more wisdom and tenderness, into the next chapter of my life.

What the Heart No Longer Wishes to Carry

For as long as I can remember,
I have carried a great weight
without fully noticing
what it was doing to me.

I moved through the years
shouldering invisible burdens—
anger,
resentment,
old disappointments,
small humiliations,
regrets that replayed themselves
long after their season had passed.

At first, each thing seemed light enough.
A slight.
A grievance.
A hardened memory tucked quietly away.

But over time,
the mind became a kind of overfilled suitcase,
stuffed with psychological odds and ends—
nothing heavy by itself,
yet together
like walking the Appalachian Trail
with a backpack full of stones.

And now,
standing at the threshold of older age,
I find myself wanting
something simpler.

The years ahead
do not ask me to carry more.
They ask me to travel lighter.

So I am learning, slowly,
the ancient art
of laying things down.

Not denying what has happened.
Not pretending the wounds were unreal.
But loosening my grip
on all that no longer serves life.

Lao Tzu whispers of water and yielding.
Thomas Merton reminds me that the rush and burden of life can obscure the heart.
Mary Oliver keeps pointing toward astonishment and attention.
And Ryōkan, with empty pockets and a quiet smile,
seems to ask:

Why carry what can be released?

Perhaps there comes a time
when we empty the suitcase completely
and keep only what is essential:

compassion,
love,
presence,
fearlessness—

and enough openness
to walk gently
through whatever days remain.

The World Needs Your Wisdom

Where are you in this moment?

Can you sit quietly for a little while and let your gaze rest gently upon the world?

Perhaps allow the edges of things to soften around you.

For a few brief moments, set down your longings, your fears, your endless becoming— and simply be here.

Can you feel a deeper truth inside, just beneath the surface?

The world is aching for the wisdom you carry.

Domestic Life in an Age of Spectacle

I have to confess that there are days when my greatest pleasure in life is simply staying home and looking carefully at the life we’ve created within these walls. I sometimes wonder what it is in me that prefers my own front porch, or the rocking chair where most of my reading takes place, to galas, movies, museums, or wine tastings. And yet, I see nothing wrong with turning my photographic gaze toward my own home above all other places.

There was once a time when I imagined a different kind of fulfillment. I wanted to become known for something, to be considered an expert in a particular field, to possess unlimited financial freedom, or to earn the admiration of my peers. But ambitions like these are inherently fragile, forever vulnerable to disappointment, changing circumstances, and the unpredictable turns of life.

What I have discovered instead is that the ordinary rhythms of domestic life steady me when the wider world feels hostile, chaotic, or beyond my control. I find genuine meaning in emptying the dishwasher, watering our plants, refilling the bird feeder, or lingering over the beautiful images in the latest issue of Leica Fotografie International. These simple rhythms of home do not feel insignificant to me. They remind me that much of what gives life meaning is quietly woven into the ordinary fabric of our days.

And I do not believe this inwardness is a retreat from reality. If anything, my photographs have become quietly political in their own way. They attempt to articulate what is precious in ordinary life — the very things worth protecting from corruption, cruelty, greed, and indifference. In their own quiet language, they push back against compromised politicians, oligarchs, power-hungry tech-bros, and the machinery of endless domination and spectacle.

Rallies and marches matter. Public witness matters. But increasingly, I suspect many of the most consequential struggles unfold elsewhere — in courtrooms, committee rooms, subcommittees, schools, libraries, local communities, and around kitchen tables where people quietly choose decency again and again.

And yes, there are days when I choose to stay home, do some reading, watch something on Netflix, repair the copier, and feel deeply grateful that there are brilliant and courageous people in the world fighting important battles on behalf of all of us.

Domestic life reminds me daily what is truly at stake. And in its own modest way, it continues to call me toward contributing — however imperfectly, however quietly — to the making of a more humane and civil society.

In Praise of the Ordinary

The environment I grew up in continually suggested that it was within my power to achieve an extraordinary life. Whatever the hurdles, I was taught that through hard work, discipline, and moral seriousness, I could overcome nearly anything and carve out an exemplary and honorable path.

I could excel in the classroom, become an Eagle Scout, contribute meaningfully to society, find a suitable life partner, and earn the respect of my peers. Most importantly, I was determined not to disappear into the anonymity of an ordinary existence. Through a deep commitment to the Protestant work ethic—discipline, perseverance, self-denial, and moral uprightness—I could somehow avoid disappearing into the blur of ordinary life. I was asked to believe that—whatever obstacles stood before me—I was destined for an exceptional life.

What no one ever told me, however, was that despite our unique ways of moving through the world, most of us are destined to live fairly ordinary lives.

And perhaps there is a quiet dignity in that.

My life, in most respects, is fairly ordinary: modest means, a small circle of friendships, an unremarkable face, and abilities that do not particularly set me apart. I once read that only a tiny fraction of humanity will ever truly distinguish itself in the eyes of the world. The rest of us will live quieter lives—lives marked less by greatness than by small fidelities, ordinary responsibilities, modest joys, private griefs, and fleeting moments of beauty.

Yet we live in a culture that struggles to acknowledge this truth. Instead, we are continually told that relentless effort, ambition, and a nose-to-the-grindstone mentality will eventually check every box. The message is subtle but persistent: if we are not exceptional, perhaps we simply have not tried hard enough.

As I’ve grown older, I’ve begun to suspect that some of the expectations I carried for my life were shaped as much by fantasy as by reality. I say this cautiously because I do not want to discourage hope or aspiration. But there are times when our culture’s insistence that anyone can become extraordinary through enough effort begins to feel less encouraging than quietly unforgiving.

For many years, I struggled against the actual contours of my life. I measured myself against impossible standards and found myself lacking. I compared my life to those who seemed exceptional in obvious ways, all the while overlooking the quieter truths of my own existence—my capacities and limitations, my gifts and blind spots, the small but meaningful ways I had learned to love, endure, create, and remain present.

But perhaps there is freedom in finally laying all of that down.

Perhaps an ordinary life is not something to escape, but something to inhabit fully.

So the next time our paths cross—either in this life or the next—ask me about all the things I’m mediocre at.

It’s actually a pretty impressive list.

How We Hold This Moment

We live in a chaotic, unsettling world—
a world of 24/7 headlines
and breaking stories
that erode our sense of stability,
casting long shadows
over the future our children will inherit.

And so—
the question becomes
how we are to hold all of this,
as the ground keeps shifting beneath us,
when the old reference points no longer hold.

Perhaps we begin here—
consider holding yourself
as you would a newborn,
with kind hands,
with patience.

Be gentle in how you speak to yourself—
the spirit startles easily.

Do not drive yourself—
the body keeps the score.

Instead—
laugh when you can,
make something—anything—
with your hands.

Art is your birthright.

Let it be small,
let it be imperfect,
let it be yours.

In the act of creating,
a deeper wisdom finds expression.

Forgive yourself.
Not halfway.
Not later.
Now.

There is a strength
in radical honesty.
And there is a healing
each time we lay down our armor
and allow
the softness of our hearts
to be seen.

Remember—
you belong here.
Not because you are flawless,
but because you are.

Do not fasten your future
to the tight fist of the past.
There are still wonders
waiting to be noticed.

So walk—
simply—
one step,
then another.

No great aspirations.
No one to impress.

Let the old fears
soften, then dissolve.

Greet the morning
with expectancy and wonder.

And when you fail—
and you will fail gloriously—
welcome it.
Failure is a faithful companion,
a brilliant teacher.

You don’t have to harden yourself
for what may come next.

Let the future arrive
as an old friend—
met with gentleness,
with kind resolve,
and with the wide, unguarded
curiosity of a child.

Tired, Open, Real

In a small, dimly lit New York apartment, the photographer Nan Goldin turned her camera toward herself. She was young, a new mother, trying—as so many do—to make sense of a life that did not easily hold together. There was no studio lighting, no careful staging—just the quiet persistence of a camera and a woman determined not to look away. Again and again, she photographed herself: tired, undone, present. Not to create an image, but to remain in contact with something real. The camera became a witness, perhaps even a companion. In those self-portraits, there is no performance—only the unmistakable trace of a life being lived from the inside, with all its confusion, tenderness, and strain.

And it is here, perhaps, that we begin to recognize something of our own story. Our longing for love begins, in the simplest of desires: to hear, and to be heard. And because life so often resists ease—because it confuses, wounds, and unsettles—it follows that many of us, myself included, are drawn not to those who move through the world untouched, but to those who feel its weight as we do. Those who are puzzled by it, those who are undone by it—the ones who retreat to their beds in the middle of the day, who lose themselves in the soft glow of a screen, who send late-night messages to a therapist because something unnamed has surfaced again. The ones who have known the quiet chemistry of antidepressants, who carry the imprint of earlier wounds, who find themselves, at times, standing just this side of tears for reasons both known and not.

There is, in all of this, a strange and tender recognition: we are not drawn to perfection, but to familiarity—to those who speak a language we did not know we knew.

And yet, we live in a world that rushes to diagnose such sadness, to tidy it up, to render it manageable. A world where beauty has become increasingly curated, polished into something bright and untroubled, where our social feeds glow with the seamless illusion of perfect families, perfect bodies, perfect days.

But life, as it is actually lived, rarely arranges itself so neatly.

The image I have chosen for this post—a neighborhood coffee shop seen through a window—holds everything at once. Light, reflection, movement, distraction. All the details are there, but they refuse to settle into order. They overlap, blur, interrupt one another. There have been days in my own life when experience arrives in just this way—fragmented, disordered, difficult to make sense of.

And yet, even here—within the blur and disorder—something is being revealed.

If we do not turn away.

Perhaps this is what gets lost in all the brightness:
the insistence on clarity, on polish, on things appearing as they should.

Because there is another kind of beauty—rarer, quieter, and far more difficult to hold—that emerges in the unguarded moment when the face releases its practiced expressions, when the mask falls away and something true, if fragile, is allowed to be seen.

Under a Witnessing Sky

The cloth is tired—
not broken,
but worn thin.

Edges frayed
like trust,
handled too roughly,
too often.

Stars still hold—
echoes of a distant galaxy bearing witness.

We wade through an uncertain future—
prices at the pump rising,
prescriptions slipping out of reach,
and voting rights under assault.

It would be easier
to turn away—
to armor up,
to self-medicate,
to go numb.

And yet,
something primordial,
imperfect,
and sacred
still remains— even as we lick our wounds
and debate next steps.

So we go on—
grieving, but not in despair,
finding our footing,
finding our voice,
as our children watch,
learning what courage looks like,
what fearlessness requires,
and what sacrifice asks of us.

What Art Knows About Us

Photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto works with a kind of radical restraint—horizon lines, long exposures, and time held in quiet suspension. His photographs feel less constructed than patiently received, as though they have emerged from sustained attention rather than deliberate design. He is not simply simplifying the image; he is letting it fall away to what cannot be reduced any further: time, light, horizon, presence.

In his Seascapes, the image is nearly empty—a single line holding sea and sky in balance. And yet, what begins to unsettle and astonish is this: these photographs are made in different parts of the world, and still they appear almost the same. Sugimoto once said he wanted to capture a view that would have been recognizable to someone living thousands of years ago. Standing before them, we are no longer anchored in a particular place, but drawn into something continuous—something older than language, older than memory, quietly enduring.

And yet, we do not all meet these images in the same way. Some feel drawn in by the stillness, the openness, the way the image seems to create space within them. Others turn away, finding them too empty, too quiet, too close to silence. Where is the color? Where is the movement? Why does everything feel so spare?

Perhaps what we are sensing is not only in the image, but in ourselves. We are often drawn to what we are missing—psychologically, even spiritually—and we resist what feels too familiar or too close to what already overwhelms us. The art we love is not a mirror of who we are; it is a quiet gesture toward who we are becoming, or who, somewhere beneath the noise, we long to be.

To be moved by Sugimoto’s Seascapes may be to recognize that there is simply too much—too much noise, too much urgency, too much to take in, and nowhere to set it down. These images do not argue or persuade. They open: a wider horizon, a slower breath, a life with a little more space in it. They seem to whisper that we can step back, that we can close the door, even briefly, on the constant hum of things, and begin again with less.

Over time, we become more whole when we learn to ask of the art that stays with us: what is this showing me about what is missing? Art is not only something we admire—it is something that calls us, quietly, in a particular direction—toward balance, toward spaciousness, toward a life that feels more like our own.

The image I’ve chosen is of Masonboro Inlet in New Hanover County, North Carolina, where the water opens gently between Wrightsville Beach and the long, unbroken stretch of Masonboro Island Reserve. It is a place where nothing insists, where the horizon does its quiet work.

And if it is true that we are drawn to what we need, I find myself wondering what this image is asking of me. And perhaps the same question can be gently extended to you: what does this image stir, or resist, within you? Does it draw you in—or leave you at a distance? Does it offer a sense of ease, or does its stillness feel unsettling? What, exactly, does it seem to know about what you might be needing now?

What we are drawn to, and what we resist, may be the very place our life is asking to grow.

A Wabi-Sabi Kind of Life

I’ve lived long enough now to feel the full range of things this brief life holds—success and failure, marriage and divorce, the fullness of raising children and the quiet of an empty nest, moments of clarity and moments I’d rather forget.

It seems no one is spared the turning of the wheel—the gentle and the difficult, the light and the shadow, all of it shaping us in ways we don’t always understand at the time.

And so, something in me has softened. I find I can listen more fully now—without rushing to respond. I can make art more freely—without leaning so heavily on the opinions of others. And I can live, more and more, with a quiet acceptance of things as they are—a wabi-sabi kind of life, held together not by perfection, but by presence, and offered without apology.

We Have a Choice

As we grow older, something quiet and decisive begins to happen.
Life either opens us to its mysteries—or gently closes around us.

I don’t mean mysteries in the abstract,
but those simple, enduring truths that live beneath belief systems—
beneath politics, doctrines, and creeds—
the kind that can’t be argued, only recognized.

Even in the midst of the daily noise,
the chaos that presses in from every side,
if we can remain open—spacious, receptive—
something in us begins to settle.
Trust grows.
A quiet contentment takes root.

And we begin to sense a more ancient knowing,
a kind of primordial wisdom
that has always been there, just beneath the surface of things,
waiting for our attention.

But it can go another way.

If our gaze narrows—
if we spend our days tracking our 401(k)s,
studying the lines on our faces in the morning mirror,
counting the deepening creases around our eyes,
and the slow, quiet silvering of our hair—
we risk becoming confined by our own anxieties,
caught in the small, tightening loops of “what if.”

Then the world begins to shrink.
We see only diminishment,
only the slow unraveling
of what we once called a productive life.

And yet—there is another calling.

To grow into elderhood is to recover a way of seeing
we once knew well.
Like a child before language,
we learn again to notice—
to point, almost instinctively,
toward the subtle beauty that lives in the everyday:
light finding its way across a wall,
a voice that feels like home,
the simple fact of being here.

To meet it all
with something like awe—
and yes, with a sense of childlike curiosity.

As wise elders, we can use our voices—
and step-in no-hand shoes—
to help secure a safe and equitable future
for the next generation of emerging adults.

And from that place,
we step forward—not away—
to engage a hurting world.

With our voices.
With our presence.
With our well-worn shoes carrying us where we’re needed—
toward a more just and gentle world
for those who are coming after us.

This is the work of wise elders:
to see clearly,
to love deeply,
and to remain available
to what matters most.

We do have a choice.

We can live these remaining days in alignment
with that deeper wisdom—
becoming steady companions,
reliable mentors,
a quiet source of grounding for children and grandchildren.

Or we can turn inward in another way—
fortifying, insulating, protecting—
redecorating, again and again,
the small rooms of our own fear.

We have a choice.

And life, even now,
is still inviting us
to choose well.

What Suffices

As I grow older, I am learning—quietly—
to tell the difference
between what holds real power
and what is merely performative.

I hear the striving of the privileged few,
their hunger for more—
while just beyond the frame
someone quietly weighs
bread or medicine.

And something in me grows quieter.

As I grow older, my grip loosens.
Ambition, once loud,
has softened.

Desire still visits—
but it no longer runs the house.
And so I am less persuaded
by the whisper
that I am not enough.

As I grow older, I begin to see
I was never the voice in my head.

What I need now feels simpler.

a friend’s presence.
a loving partner.
the quiet pride of being a father.
unhurried mornings.

A poem by Robert Lax.
A photograph by Minor White.

These are enough.

A friend’s voice.
A lingering lunch
where conversation turns toward what is tender.

A glass of red wine on the porch.
A journal page filled with gratitude.

As I grow older,
I ask less of life—
and receive more than I imagined.

And so I turn again
to the ordinary moment—

to be totally here
and nowhere else.

to notice
and feel everything—
everything.

What We Carry Is Not Ours Alone

Over the past few months, I’ve been accompanied by a quiet melancholy.

It arrived without announcement. I can’t quite trace its origins. Perhaps too much news. That steady, low-grade ache of the world. Or perhaps the recent diagnosis of osteoarthritis in my back—a reminder, not unkind but unmistakable, that time is doing what time does.

But this isn’t grief. Not quite. Nor is it heartache.

It feels more like a soft, persistent knowing— that happiness, while real, is often brief, and that much of life is lived in the company of things unfinished, imperfect, and quietly heavy.

And yet, because of this— what is gentle begins to glow. What is calm, what is kind, what is graceful— these stand out now with a kind of unexpected clarity.

I caught a glimpse of this a few months ago while having lunch with my friend James. Across the room, a young woman sat alone at the bar. No conversation. No movement. Just her, in the stillness of that empty space.  I know nothing about her life. Why she was there. What she carried.  And yet—I knew the feeling.

You can find the full piece over on Substack: https://substack.com/@timauman1/note/c-249915137