Limitless

There's a pill I sometimes wish were real. The one in the film Limitless, the little tablet that cracks the mind wide open and lets a man use all of it, total recall, total focus, every door in the brain flung open at once. Or the version in Phenomenon, where John Travolta's character is suddenly, inexplicably brilliant, seeing patterns and connections the rest of us can't. Some twist of fate, kind or cruel, and the mind becomes limitless.

I know it's a myth, the idea that we only use ten percent of our brains. We use all of it. But some days I'd still take the pill, because some days the whole machine feels stuck, and I can't find the switch. I can’t find the one button to start the machine.

That's where I am right now. Not empty, exactly. Not out of thoughts. It's focus I'm missing, the mind's ability to hone in and bring the one thing forward. And the thing I want to bring forward, and can't, is my photography.

I love to create. I do. But lately I can't seem to make myself gather the gear and go. Call it unmotivated, call it unwilling, call it plain old lazy. Except I know it isn't quite any of those, because underneath there's a quieter thing I don't like admitting: I'm afraid that if I force it, whatever I make will be mediocre. So I don't force it. And nothing gets made at all.

Which is strange, because it wasn't always like this. When I was starting out I shot everything. Anything. A shadow, a stranger, a nothing little corner of light on a wall. It all thrilled me. I didn't know enough to judge it, so I just shot, and the shooting was the joy.

I wrote not long ago about a boy who sat down across from me while I was working, eight years old, utterly at ease, and about how somewhere between his age and mine we lose that innocence. I think the same thing has happened to my craft. I know too much now. The eye that spent five decades getting educated is the same eye that now sits in judgment before I've even raised the camera. I can see the mediocre shot coming, so I don't take it. The mastery that should have set me free is the very thing holding me still.

People who don't know me might reach for an easy answer. They'd say it's the marriage, that a younger wife must not be comfortable with the work. That's baloney. Lyn is the one asking to help me find my way back. She lights up when I create. She has a hundred photos of me with a camera in my hands, lost in what I'm seeing. It isn't her. If anything, she's the one still trying to fan the thing.

So what is it. I've said "I don't know" a few times now, but that’s not true. I think I do know. I think it's everything I'm carrying right now. My father, gone these last few months. All the changes, the new bakery, the new city, the whole life resetting at once. The quiet math that tells me retirement is maybe ten years off now, closer than it's ever been. The well I create from is the same well all of this sits in, and right now it's full.

There's a line from Van Gogh, a personal favorite. There may be a great fire in our soul, yet no one ever comes to warm himself at it, and the passers-by see only a wisp of smoke.

That's it. That's the whole thing. I'd been telling myself maybe the fire had gone out. But Van Gogh isn't describing a dead fire. He's describing a great one, buried so deep that all anyone can see from the outside is the smoke. And that's the truer picture of where I am. The fire didn't die. It's under everything I'm carrying, and these days, from the outside and some days even from where I'm standing, all I can make out is a little smoke curling up.

But smoke means there's still fire. It's down there. I just have to dig back to it.

And if there's one thing I've been learning lately, it's that these things move in seasons. The cold ones don't stay. Maybe this is just winter for the part of me that makes things. Maybe the fire's down low for a while because it has to be, because a man can only tend to so much at once.

That's allowed.

The spring comes when it comes.

For now, I'll live with the smoke. And I'll trust what it's telling me, that somewhere under all of this, the fire is still burning.