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Day 3670, ten years.

Daily picture, My thoughts

These are the pictures I took 3673 days ago, on March 24, 2016. It was the day I told myself I should take my so-called hobby a bit more seriously, so I challenged myself to take a picture every day and post it online. For the first 604 days, it was just pictures, and I posted on a photo website that I no longer have. I still have all the pictures, but you cannot find them on this blog. I am not sure why I moved to WordPress, but I guess it was about time to not only post a picture a day but also share some of my writing. I have always written, but irregularly, and I guess it was time to take that hobby more seriously, too. I never really posted on social media, mainly because I moved away from them in 2016, and because I have all kinds of opinions and I don’t care too much for interaction with people who have other opinions. That is just a waste of time. I had a few good interactions with people who commented here over the years, who might disagree with me, but they were in the form of long emails, not lunch-sized critiques with a side of word salad.

If you look at the top of this post, you can see that I am on day 3670, not 3673. I don’t know exactly how that happened, but I remember a few times that I realized just in time that I had entered the wrong day numbers for a couple of days and had to go back a few posts to fix it. I guess that happened another 3 times, but by then, I could never recover from that mistake. Imagine changing the title of a thousand posts… But I swear I posted every day, though sometimes it was the day after, after midnight, or when I was in an airplane and had to wait until whatever time it was in the new time zone. I will stick with the 3670 for today because, as I said, I’ve been doing this for 10 years, and if I may say so myself, that is something.

Photography is still my hobby, but I don’t take pictures every day like I did at the beginning. I did that for a couple of years, often taking several good pictures in one day. Over time, I started using pictures from other days. So it is still a picture a day, but sometimes I go back to pictures from the last month, and sometimes to ones from 30 years or more, and use one of those old pictures. I still love taking pictures. For the last 1.5 years, I have been going to Fredrikstad’s center on Sunday mornings to take pictures. I did this just to push myself to find inspiration in streets I have walked many times and have seen every building through one of my lenses, but now I am done with it, and I wait for the moment when nature wakes up here, and I can go out with my macro lens again.

It never feels like a burden to write every day. It is so normal now that I see no reason to quit. Even on the busiest days, I always find a few minutes to snap an interesting picture with my phone, write a three-sentence poem-like thing, and post it. I can do that on the toilet if I have to. But seriously, for someone like me who thinks way too much and knows all too well how repetitive daily life is, these five minutes on the toilet, or more normally, 30 minutes to an hour behind my computer looking for a cool picture, editing it, and getting inspired to write something about it, keep me going. Without art, life is not much worth.

I asked the AI overlord to pick 10 random days. I took screenshots of those days and posted them below. 

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Day 3498, seen them all.

Daily picture

Over the 3500 days I have been posting a picture each day, only 1% have humans in them. I am not exactly sure what that says about me, but I do think that the buildings around us and the nature we walk through are so much more unique and interesting than the people I meet walking where I walk. If you’ve seen one, you have seen them all.

Day 3474, more memories.

Daily picture, My thoughts

I want to write about my past, and it makes sense to start at the beginning, simply because that’s where it began. The problem is that most of what I remember is a series of loose facts, such as living there, being with those people, having that job, and whether it was enjoyable or not, or something in between. I can remember what my old room looked like, mostly because I have seen that one picture of the room from time to time, it’s just the picture I remember holding in my hands if I’m honest. I actually don’t know what it is to remember in the sense of reliving it in my mind. 

What I know of the time from before I moved out of my parents’ house is almost nothing. I can string together a story, I remember the story of my youth. I can point to the tree I climbed when I was 11, and looking down from that vantage point for the first time feels like it is etched in my memory, like what vertigo feels like whenever I experience it now. I remember feeling vertigo in that tree, and more than 30 years later, when standing on a 10-story-high balcony. I recall many strong emotions, and they are often associated with a specific place. However, the feelings are real, but I have no certainty that the locations are correct. 

After I moved out, the story became richer, perhaps because I had finally started living my own life, and the vacation was over. The steps I took now, I did for the first time on my own; I paid attention to where I was going. However, as I mentioned earlier, I am a skeptic and don’t entirely trust my own memories, except for the basic facts that I have lived in different places, attended various schools, and held other jobs. Later experiences now taint most of the feelings that accompanied them, and my feelings about specific events have also evolved over the years. I also believe that if you are currently experiencing strong emotions, such as a breakup, you should recognize that you are the last one to have an objective assessment of what is happening. It often takes time to acknowledge that the strong feelings were, for the most part, an exaggeration and a reflection of how the world around you expects that you should react, how your background taught you what an appropriate memory should look like.   

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