Earlier this week I received Alec Soth’s newest book, A Pound of Pictures. This book represents a few things for me. The first is that it’s both my first Alec Soth book and my first photo book, and because of that, I had to get it signed.

This is a massive book, one of the biggest books I own. I’ve only seen the first few pictures because I want to clear an entire day to slowly go through the entire book. Going through his YouTube channel last month taught me so much about photography, especially about building and reading narrative projects, so I want to give the book the respect it deserves, or at least, as much as I can give it.

This book also represents my intention to climb up a new mountain. I look at myself in the mirror every morning and seem to find new grey hairs and wrinkles. I look at the calendar and think, Damn, it’s already March? I look back at my days and think, Am I really living? So I want to do something new and challenging, something that scares me, something that I can look back on and be proud of. So—what is it?

I have no idea.

Okay, sure, I have a few ideas, but I don’t want to reveal them publicly. I don’t want to set some sort of imaginary expectation in people’s heads. I don’t want to set an intention to the universe and not follow through on it, because I’ve done that enough in my life, and it doesn’t feel good.

I’ve been quietly working away in my notebooks this year, and my thoughts feel clear for the first time in a long time. I can see a path opening up in front of me, and I hope I have the courage to walk down it. These ideas are crazy. They’re insane. They scare the shit out of me, but oh my god am I eager to see them through. I have to do the work, and none of this, this life, this existence, matters if I don’t do the work.

I’m getting way too old to leave so many projects unfinished. Every day I wake up thinking if this is the end, and every day I live my life in mediocrity. I’m sick and tired of living this way. I need more. I need to do more.

So I bought a book. And now my life will be better.

Right?

I’m somewhat obsessive about numbers. It’s not something I’m consciously aware of, but they are something that quietly rules my life. I add page numbers to every notebook I write in, count every book I’ve read, and log how much I weigh every week or month. Recently, a few more numbers have emerged that I want to note.

The first is that yesterday I completed my thirtieth consecutive day of practicing my guitar. In 2021, I had stopped my regular practice, and I wanted to change that for 2022, so I decided to do Austin Kleon’s 100-day Practice and Suck Less Challenge. I printed out the PDF and pasted it to the inside cover of my notebook, and after every practice session, I would mark an X over the current number. After 30 days of this, I can truly say I suck less at playing my guitar. My callouses have returned, and my playing has improved greatly. I’m happy about my progress and eager to finish out the next 70 days strong.

One hundred days ago I hit my move goal 1,100 days in a row, and this morning I hit 1,200. My health is a big priority for me, so seeing this number keep getting bigger every day is validating. I notice when I don’t move around much, which has been happening a lot in the mornings as I get work done, so my evening workout routines are a great way to wind down for me. It relieves any pent up stress I’ve accumulated, and it helps me sleep well at night.

Which brings me to the final number I wanted to note. Ever since I purchased the Apple Watch Series 6 in September of 2020, I’ve worn it to bed every night to track my sleep. A few nights ago I woke up to eight low heart rate notifications. The lowest number you can set for this notification is 40bpm, and throughout the night my heart rate dipped below 40bpm eight times, reaching 36bpm at one point. I’ve never seen it get this low. I regularly see it get down to 38 and 39bpm, but never 36bpm. My heart rate has averaged about 45 to 48bpm for the 10 or so years I’ve been tracking it, so I normally have a low heart rate, but goddamn. How I’m still alive is beyond me.

I’ve been spending the past week watching Alec Soth’s channel on YouTube, and yesterday I watched his video titled COLORS #52. In it, he looks through the book COLORS: A Book About a Magazine About the Rest of the World and quotes Oliviero Toscani, one of the co-founders of the magazine. Oliviero is being interviewed, and when asked if there are any photographers or artists capable of carrying on a project as pioneering as COLORS was in the early 90s, he answers:

Certainly, only that no one teaches them not to be frightened of being frightened. If you do something without being frightened, it’ll never be interesting or good. Everyone wants to be sure of what they’re doing. Any really interesting idea simply can’t be safe.

When I went to film school, I remember early on how courageous I was in expressing my ideas and concepts with the stories I wrote (even though I failed a lot), but at one point, I lost that. I became afraid of the writer’s room, of seeing the expressions on my classmates faces after reading the 10 page scene I wrote an hour before class started. I remember how often I would watch movies when feeling stuck, and how my pages reeked of what I last watched. I remember how painful it became to show up to class with my subpar pages, and how ashamed I felt when I felt excited that I had something to write about after I found out my uncle had died in a car crash. I remember I decided to start writing novels instead of movies because of this fear. I had wanted to run away from it, but after writing two books that will never see the light of day, I realize now that I’m still frightened.

I’m frightened of being judged and ridiculed, of failing. I’m frightened of exploring my weird ideas because they might not be “marketable” or “popular.” I picked up photography because it was something so different from writing, and at first, I really enjoyed it. But again, at one point, I became paralyzed by fear. My artistic impulse has been to keep pushing my art forward, but when I’m afraid of so many things, I don’t end up creating anything at all.

In my post Bravery from July 2020, I quoted Rebecca Toh. I had asked her how she had the confidence to carry a camera with her everywhere and photograph people. “The important thing,” she said:

is not to let your shyness get in your way. The thing about photography is that it throws you into direct contact with life, and that can be scary at times, but if you want to do the photography you want to do, there is simply no way about it except to go out bravely and shoot.

I’ve been trying to find the courage ever since, but maybe I’ve been approaching it wrong. Maybe it’s not courage I need but the confidence to be frightened. To admit to myself that these ideas might not be “marketable,” that these photos might not be “popular,” but so what? Like Oliviero says, “Any really interesting idea simply can’t be safe.”

Like Pema Chödrön writes in The Places That Scare You, “Do I prefer to grow up and relate to life directly, or do I choose to live and die in fear?”

One of the things I want to do more of this year is write. I don’t want to write a novel or short stories or a screenplay; I want to write more posts for my website. I have a long list of ideas built up, of unfinished thoughts and sentences, and I want to spend every morning this year going through them, fleshing them out, spending good time on them, and posting a finished product I’m proud of to my website. That was the idea, at least. Sure, I’m only a week into the new year, so the year is still very young, but damn, I wish I was more productive with it already.

The struggle, and every writer knows this, every creator knows this, is that you have to show up every day. The muse helps those that show up, and if I don’t show up, then I won’t create. That’s the heart of the matter. Does that suck? Yes, of course it does. But I have to show up, whatever the cost, and in this case, the only cost is time. Time is so damn valuable yet I’m finding it so hard to find enough of it nowadays. Where does it all go?

I’ve been spending about a quarter of an hour to half an hour every morning sitting in front of my computer poking away at an essay that just isn’t materializing the way I’d hoped. The point was to show up every morning, to build up that writing habit again, but I feel like I haven’t. Not yet, at least. I’m “pretending,” to an extent. I’m checking off the task from my mental checklist and calling it good enough and moving on to the next thing.

I wish I spent more time on it. I wish I had more time to spend on it, but life is moving so fast that it’s so very tough to keep up with it. So what’s the answer? I wish I knew. But here’s the deal I’m making with myself: I have to show up and do the work before I can go out and play.

I don’t want to live a passive life anymore. I want to live an active life, a life I can look back on with pride. And to do that, I simply have to show up every day and live.