Passions And The March Of Years

We humans are anything but static creatures, so perhaps it should come as no surprise to me that I have moved away from many of my former passions, but I still wonder what has happened to them. Why did I let them fall by the wayside? Will I ever return to them in any meaningful way?

I graduated from high school in 1987, and since then my passions for photography has waned. Someone I knew in high school recently pointed out that far too many people who own cameras consider themselves photographers, but I am glad to say that while I have won awards in small contest and drawn paychecks for camera work, I am not among that set of self-deluded folk. It's not really so much that the passion has waned as that my ability to pay for everything involved and my access to darkroom facilities has declined significantly. I always enjoyed the process of developing my film, composing the prints, and getting everything to look just right. Hell, I loved the odor of photochemicals that in high school was like some odd perfume or cologne we photography students seemed incapable of cleaning off, letting it linger on our hands like our secret bond.

Music, once so much more than an accompaniment to driving, has moved into the background. I once chased information with such fervor that I would spend hours flipping through bins of vinyl, searching for those hard-to-find gems that would round out some obscure corner of my collection. I still enjoy listening to music, and iTunes, my iPod, and my CD burner make that easier than ever before, but it's lost its luster. Even the stores selling used albums now have good lighting, which negates one of the biggest draws I had to such places a couple decades ago.

I was also an avid game player in those days. Don't get me wrong, I still play computer games. I play bridge—be it against the computer, online, or in person—far more than anything else, knocking off anywhere from a dozen to a couple hundred hands in a night, but without Sunshine as my partner, it isn't the same. When she finishes her MBA, perhaps, things will return to the way they were in that regard, but who knows.

These and so many smaller things have dropped from the more central roles they once played in my life. True, I have to set aside time to grade assignments, I have to go to work and help shape the next generation of writer, and I have to do laundry and other household chores that were either not mine or were more broadly distributed when I was younger, but still I wonder: will I ever reclaim these things? Maybe it was the difficulty in pursuing them that made them so precious. Maybe it was having to develop my own film, cue up tapes and LPs, and arrange those game nights that made them seem like escapes from the mundane. Now they are the mundane. Digital photography is convenient, yes, but it has never matched halide photography for me. Maybe I just need to find that next passion. Maybe I have and don't know it yet.