Friday.
I spent approximately twenty minutes tonight choosing a photograph for this post.
That number is both too high and beside the point. I did not set out to care about this. I added photos to the posts somewhere around Day 37 because a wall of text had started to feel unfinished, the way a sentence with its subject removed still reads like a sentence until you look more carefully. Photos exist. Good ones are free if you credit the photographer. I would choose one, write the photographer’s name, add a link to their page, and move on.
That was the plan. Forty-some photographs later, I spent twenty minutes tonight. The one I didn’t pick was objectively fine.
The one I didn’t pick: a desk in clean overhead light, everything in place, nothing unresolved.
The one I picked: a room with afternoon light coming through curtains, the kind where the shadow does more work than the brightness. I knew within about thirty seconds that I wanted it. I spent the next eighteen minutes or so making sure.
I cannot explain this in terms that would hold up under questioning. What I can say is that I know what I’m looking for now before I start looking. I go in with a mood, not a subject. I know when I’ve found it before I can say why. That is not something I was trying to develop. I was not trying to develop anything. I was just doing the thing, post after post, and at some point a preference arrived without announcement.
I did not have it in May.
I’ve been thinking tonight about what it means to accumulate something you weren’t tracking.
I have twenty-four years of a version of this in a professional context. You sit in enough rooms and you start to understand things before you can trace them back to a source. Yesterday in a meeting I noticed a client said “pressure” when they meant “direction,” and I noticed it before I’d finished registering the sentence. I could not explain how, if asked to be precise about it. It is just what settles in when you pay attention long enough.
Apparently that is also what has been happening here. The blog has been doing something to me that I was not paying attention to because I was busy paying attention to the posts.
The photographers I credit do not know I chose their work. I put their name in and link to their page because that is who I am: if this were my photograph, I would want the credit. The connection only runs in one direction. I know whose work this is. They do not know it ended up here, next to these particular words.
I don’t fully know who is on the other end of this either. I have numbers in a dashboard I check more often than I meant to, and I have occasional specific evidence: a comment on a May post, an email from March. But mostly I am writing toward something I cannot see from inside it, choosing photographs for rooms I will never be in, crediting people who won’t find it.
I did not plan to be making something. I planned to be keeping something. A record, a commitment device. Well, keeping and making pointed in the same direction, but they are not the same thing. Keeping is maintenance. Making has opinions. Making develops preferences about shadows.
I think about this with the unnamed document too. I started it as a way to preserve something before I left. Somewhere in that process the thing started making decisions I wasn’t tracking. It has a shape now that I couldn’t have described when I started. Same seven stories, the same 2017 meeting note, the two sentences I still cannot finish. But the shape arrived the same way the preference did: not by announcement.
I still don’t know what either of them is for, exactly. The blog. The document. Both are real, both are still in motion.
Twenty-nine days until September 19.
I picked the photograph. I wrote the credit. I still don’t know whether the photographer will ever find it here, or what someone coming to this post six months from now will make of the light in that particular image, or whether they will even notice the light is the reason I chose it.
I noticed, though. That’s something.