34: slow starts

a late hello to 2026

By the second week of a new year, we let go of the celebration, the joy of jumping into something new, of saying Happy New Year when greeting or signing off on emails. I mean, that makes sense, right? The novelty of a new year wears off, and it’s just another day in another month, rarely anything more than unremarkable. I guess I’ve been thinking about time and the way it’s both meaningful and meaningless a lot lately. Specifically, in relation to starting slow, in the year, and in other aspects of life.

So often we praise the act of diving right in, getting straight to business, cutting to the chase, finishing things up, you already know all the overused phrases. I think it’s worthwhile to go slow and find your footing, to try, stop, and try something different. Experimentation just for the sake of it. Knowing that sometimes the arc is extremely long and being okay with leaving something like loose ends to come back to. As I approach another birthday, one that marks the halfway point of my 30’s, I’ve been thinking a lot about what’s next for me in life. The measurements of time, of course, give us this illusion that there are chapters, reference points, or milestones. I know that realistically, there is no “next part” of my life. There’s just my life. Nevertheless, 2026 marks 20 years since I bought my first camera to intentionally start making photographs and call myself a photographer. It feels like a weird milestone, since most days I still feel like I’m just beginning. I was young then, so I’m not saying I’ve been a professional at this for 20 years, but I’ve been a photographer for 20 years. At the moment, I’m in a strange phase of uncertainty after leaving a day job three years ago and questioning whether it’s the right move to go back, again, to something steadier and more stable. Or, on to something completely new and different.

Goosewing Beach, Little Compton, RI. 2025.

Three years ago, I thought this leap I was making was the beginning of my new life in a lot of ways. One where I’d work for myself for the rest of my days, do whatever I had to do to make things work, and have total control over my time. Obviously, that’s extremely naive, and after this second spell of freelancing full-time for myself (the first being about 10 years ago now), I’ve learned that maybe I’m chasing a reality I don’t even want. Much of the reality of being a full-time photographer in 2026 involves doing things I don’t want to do. Isn’t it a little disingenuous to say I want to do this full-time if I don’t want to do what’s required to make it my main source of income? Would I then be better off and happier doing some other thing to make money, so I could focus all of my creative energy on the aspects of photography that I love?

While it does take real guts and courage to go off on your own and support yourself through a craft, I also think there’s a lot of merit in a day job that allows you to have financial freedom to create on your own terms. Everyone is wired differently, but I know for me, if I’m worried about my own stability, I tend not to be able to focus on much else. When I look back on the 20 years I’ve spent being a photographer, I realize a lot of what I think was my best work was made when I was working another job outside of photography. I think my initial reaction when I started to feel like this stint of freelancing was up for me was to feel like I failed. But then, I realized that I’m choosing this. I’m not at the end of a rope; I’m actually deciding that what I’m doing right now isn’t worth the effort it’s taking out of me for the return. I’m protecting something I love doing by deciding not to burn myself out on the extraneous aspects involved in making that thing my job. I definitely didn’t go down this path with aspirations to make money, but I’d like to be able to buy food and pay my rent like anyone else. The starving artist type isn’t one I romanticize. At the end of the day, much of what I want to do with a camera doesn’t have a clear or viable, long-term monetization strategy, and I am at peace with that instead of feeling defeated.

My hometown, Cumberland, RI. 2025.

I just finished reading Haruki Murakami’s newest novel, The City and Its Uncertain Walls. It took me some time to get through this one, but by the last 50 or so pages, I was so glad I stuck with it. In a rare afterword, Murakami writes about the origins of this story and how he originally published an early version as a novella in a magazine over 40 years ago while managing a jazz bar in Tokyo. He explains candidly that, for many reasons, he wasn’t totally satisfied with the version of the story that ended up in that magazine and never allowed it to be reprinted. Someday, he thought, he’d return to the story and finish it correctly when the time was right. He went on to continue writing and publishing for the next 40+ years, and his masterpieces of fiction don’t need any intro from me. It wasn’t until 2020 that he devoted the time to rework and finish the story as he intended. “For so long this work had felt like a small fish bone caught in my throat, something that bothered me,” he writes. He then ends the afterword with this:

For me—both as a writer and as a person—this little bone was very significant. Rewriting the work for the first time in some forty years, and stopping by that town again, made me actually aware of this.

As Jorge Luis Borges put it, there are basically a limited number of stories one writer can seriously relate in his lifetime. All we do—I think it’s fair to say—is take that limited palette of motifs, change the approach and methods as we go, and rewrite them in all sorts of ways.

Truth is not found in fixed stillness, but in ceaseless change and movement. Isn’t this the quintessential core of what stories are all about? At least that’s how I see it.

It’s remarkable to me that a story Murakami wrote so early on in his career, during a time when he was earning his living totally outside of writing, is one he felt so drawn to revisiting and finishing. Personally, I’m really glad he did. This book was such a fun journey, and it’s full of some beautiful reflections on life, time, libraries, and love. One of my favorite passages near the end of the book was when the narrator was speaking with Yellow Submarine Boy about the nature of this fictional town with its high walls, where time doesn’t exist:

“So how long will our—cooperative unit last?

“How long?” the boy repeated in a flat voice. “That’s a meaningless question. Because the clock in this town has no hands.”

“So time here doesn’t progress.

“Exactly. Time here stopped.”

I gave this some thought and then said, “So if there’s no time, nothing ever accumulates?”

“Right, where’s there’s no time there’s no accumulation. What looks like accumulation is nothing but a transitory illusion cast by the present. Imagine turning pages in a book. The pages change but the page numbers do not. There’s no logical connection between the new page and the previous one. The scenery around us may change but we’re glued to the same spot.”

“An eternal present?”

“Exactly. The only time that exists in this town is the present. There is no accumulation. Everything is overwritten, renewed. That’s the world we belong to now.”

As Borges reminded Murakami, and as Murakami reminded me, nothing good comes from staying still. Change and movement are essential for an engaging story. Aside from a few rare exceptions, a good plot or story usually demands that something happens. It’s funny to me that most of us know this, yet we still fear change in our own lives. I don’t honestly know what I’ll do next, but I know I’ll continue to live a creative life that feels like the story I want it to be. It’s time to get the gears of change moving again, to rearrange the elements of my life a bit and adjust the approach.

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Little Compton, RI. 2025.

January, in New England, often feels like one stretch of endless grey days that are hardly distinguishable from one another. I thought that this year would start slow and relaxed, mostly because I had no plans and not too much going on in general, but it hasn’t quite gone that way. Someone drove into the side of my car a couple of days after New Year’s and totaled it. Thankfully, no one was hurt, but it definitely seemed to set the tone for what felt like a week of falling down a never-ending flight of stairs. For days afterward, I woke up with the car being destroyed as the first thing on my mind. It was just a car, I know, but I’ve been through a lot with it and intended to keep it much longer. Add to that the stress of navigating insurance companies, needing to buy another car, and the events in the world over the last two weeks, and I’d say it’s been a pretty abrasive start to the year. Reading with a cup of coffee in the still-dark hours of the morning on these grey January days has been my only escape.

Going into 2026, I decided against giving myself any real resolutions. Instead, I wanted to focus on a few habits I have or would like to have. I made a strictly defined set of goals and resolutions going into 2024, which led me to walk into 2025 without any real direction in mind for a lot of reasons (I thought it was stupid, I was mad at myself for not making certain things happen the year before, etc.) Comparing the two years, I decided that this year I’d settle somewhere in the middle. I’d try to focus on being more disciplined in areas I know I need to be, but also avoid rigidity and anything that feels arbitrary. Instead of resolutions, I wanted to set some habits I intend to focus on. Focusing on my own health and quitting habits that make me feel awful are sort of a baseline for 2026, but in terms of my creative life, I wanted to outline a few here.

My Listening Habits

Like most people, I listen to music a lot. On average, I’d say at least eight hours a day. Over the last few years, I’ve felt like I lost my ability to discover new music or make a connection with new music in the way I’ve made connections with music in the past. I think some of this is natural in the way you rarely make new friends like your oldest friends, but I also think some of it can be attributed to my lack of attention given to new music. In 2026, I’ve decided to focus on listening to one album each day from beginning to end. Ideally, I’ll get at least two or three listens in throughout the day, but at a minimum, I’ll listen through once while I drink my coffee in the morning and hopefully again, a bit more passively, throughout the day.

I’d like for this habit to be a mix of genuinely new music, but also important albums that I know I should know better than I do, like that list of important books in my head that I’m familiar with but have never fully read. Occasionally, I’ll give a listen to an album I really love but haven’t played from beginning to end in a while, but the goal is to get away from listening to much of the same music I play on repeat. Each month, my plan is to share a playlist of songs here from the prior month’s listening. I’m in my second week of listening to an album in full each day, and so far, it’s been really enjoyable. For this to work the way I want, I need to actually find new music. If there’s an album you love, one you especially think is a piece of art from beginning to end, please share it with me here in the comments, or however you’d like.

My Writing Habits

I want to be more focused this year in the travel writing I do through this newsletter, as well as the writing I don’t share. I’ve been eying some workshops and seminars (a small shoutout here to a really cool new space that is opening up in 2026) to continue to push myself to learn and to be in a workshop environment again. One day, I’d really like to get an MFA in creative writing. Although I don’t see that day coming very soon, I’d like to make steps to work towards it. On a day-to-day basis, I’ve been determined to write at least a few pages in my notebook, even if it’s nothing more than bullet points or a list of to-dos. I never started writing on Substack to gain any kind of following (actually, the more people I see subscribing here, the more daunting hitting the publish button feels). This has always been a place for my own personal reflection and practice, but I am incredibly thankful for anyone who signs up to receive these newsletters in their inbox.

My experience on Substack over the last four years has been the most additive, positive online experience I’ve ever found. My intention in 2026 is to streamline things with my own newsletter a bit more cohesively. I’m planning to write more about travel, not as a guide, but with the same sort of documentary and personal approach I take with my photography. I also write fiction, which I don’t share here, but this year I want to focus on a few pieces of writing I’ve been working on and continue to edit/rework them.

My Photography Habits

As I said at the start of this post, this year marks two decades of calling myself a photographer. I was a kid when I started, but I was serious as hell, and I don’t discount those years as a part of my career just because I was young. A span that long has naturally led me to look back on a lot of the work I’ve made and to ask myself big questions about where I want to go in the next 20 years. Specifically, I’m questioning how much of my income I want to continue staking on my work. There are good reasons to freelance full-time doing something you love, and there are also good reasons to decouple your income from something you love. I’ve had a really hard time navigating my way into and through the world of commercial photography because so much of what is made for clients is utterly forgettable and intended to be seen for seconds. I’m not knocking anyone who pays their bills this way; it just doesn’t fulfill me at all. I know I want to spend the next 20 years of my career photographing people who interest me, telling impactful stories, and pushing myself as a documentarian.

This winter, I am embracing the fact that seasons exist for a reason, and I would do best to align my work output with the season I’m in. In general, this has meant realizing that right now, I have a ton of work to look back on and reflect on from the last three years. Some of it I really love and am proud of, but I haven’t had the time to figure out how I want to put it into the world. I’m using these slower months to do that and to primarily focus on my first solo show, which starts on 01/28/26 at the Dryden Gallery. I’ve been thinking more in terms of series and projects these days, rather than photographing anything and everything around me. As a creative exercise, I’ve decided to give myself a small, personal project or prompt each month. I’m currently working on January’s and will share highlights from these each month as they pass.

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That’s my outlook and the creative intentions I’ve set for 2026. Nothing unsustainable, just a few little changes or tweaks to my daily habits that I’m actually excited about and want to embrace. Slow and steady, with small efforts that I intend to keep carrying into every year ahead of me. The photos in this post are from a revisiting of some older work that I feel like embody the beauty I see in slowness, whether it’s in the start of a day or the span of life. They remind me: linger, take it slow, we’re not here for all that long.

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