I had some time off work between Christmas and the New Year. As I approached that time I wanted to do something a little different than just hang around the house (well, in addition to hanging around the house). A little project, perhaps…
A potential candidate materialised faster than I’d expected, and very soon I had decided to scan some slides into digital format. These slides were significant for at least a couple of reasons: they represented a visual document of my very first trip to Europe, at the ripe old age of 21. I’d been overseas before. Well, to be more precise, up to that point my overseas travel had been solely an inbound experience through the migration of my family. This, however, was my first outbound adventure, off my own steam and paid with my own hard earned dollars.
The second reason for the significance of these images was that it was the first and only time I have ever shot on slide film. Over the course of a few months I must have shot around 25 rolls of film. I don’t really remember why I decided to shoot on slides. Maybe I was already anticipating an image sharing economy, something that would conveniently feed my narcissism in a larger social context. In times gone by we used to call these occasions ‘slide nights’. Just ask your grandparents.
This little project has been a surprisingly rich experience, and not only for it’s nostalgia value, which it has certainly served up in spades, but for the opportunity it has given me to reconnect with my younger self – when it was all ahead of me, without really having any inkling what I was looking at. In the occasional image where my face pops up, I can see the passion and gusto with which I was determined to paint the blank canvas that was my future. I am mesmerised by dark eyes looking back at me, daring life to send all manner of slings and arrows. Determined to arm against a sea of troubles the young man in those images exuded strength, confidence and self-determination. Such was the happy delusion of my youth.
Of course, I was ill-equipped for life. In fact, I really had no control over its unfolding and so, as time marched on I often managed to skate over life’s surfaces, avoiding the potential potholes through a haphazard cocktail of luck, charm and blissful ignorance. There were street smarts too, but they did not always help me make good choices. In fact, some good choices were made along the way, despite my inadvertent stumblings and tendencies to self-sabotage (hello, my dear wife).
Despite being reminded of the largely clueless wayfaring of my youth, what this reconnection with my younger self has helped to crystallise, with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, is how much of who I am today was already there all along.
This young man, full of verve and vigour, is not altogether unfamiliar. Clearly he exhibited
- an impatience with inertia (I sped through so many cities, always moving from one to the next, that I’m sure I caused whiplash in more than one station master);
- an insatiable curiosity to understand ‘otherness’;
- a nascent love of motorbikes (travelling Malta on a scooter, forced to share narrow roads with large unyielding buses, must have triggered something that lay dormant for many years);
- a love of traveling alone;
- an appreciation for art and the image (I couldn’t get enough of art galleries and I see now that I had a reasonable eye for travel photography);
- a fondness for solitude (I do like my own company and this was an opportunity to enjoy and indulge in all of the above);
- a feeling of being part of a larger picture – humanity itself.
And whilst the person I am today was not an inevitability, some of the ingredients were there, I just didn’t recognise them, nor was I yet able to intentionally fashion them into particularly ‘useful’ shapes. But nonetheless I can now map a rough trajectory (rough being the operative word) that provides me with some sense of a narrative, even if it’s uneven, fragmented, incomplete and generally unintelligible to those around me.
That trip shook me loose, laying bare some of the foundational pieces that make up who I am, giving me an opportunity to hold them in my hand and put them to work. Even now I’m still a work in progress, and the workmanship isn’t always of the highest standard, but this is who I am. The irony is that it has taken me 30 years to come full circle and to ‘witness’, from a distance, a moment when things began to take form. It seems that I have been as much an accidental tourist of my own life as I was during some of those times travelling across Europe. But I’ve enjoyed the adventure, and I’d visit again. And, if I’m fortunate enough to live another 30 years, by then I’d like to think my life will have become my most favourite destination.
be kind 2 yourself 