#81 – October 12, 2021

 

 

Hello!

After publishing this photograph without permission, M may very well be fronting a judge and jury of her peers asking questions about my death. Please be kind to her if that is the case.

In my defence, I love this photo and it backs up perfectly what I said on yesterdays post about my love of capturing a moment. Both mother and child look beautiful and the pose I’ve captured here with the opposing hands on hips is gorgeous! Black and white removes all viewer bias towards colour and shows these two beautiful girls as they are. And no matter who you are, if you are looking at a camera, you have a camera face and there are no camera faces evident here.

The theme of this morning seems to be “purge”.

I’ve unsubscribed from at least ten mailing lists and am looking forward to ending the delivery of many more. These things have a tendency to creep up on you and if you don’t take stock every now and then, you’ll lose control of your inbox.

I won’t mention names, but someone I’m married to has more than one inbox with an unread email count of four figures. It makes me physically shake just thinking about it. I don’t know how she (or he, remember, I’m not mentioning names) can even look through the inbox with that number in bold openly mocking her … or him.

When I do a bit of self-analysis, I tend to find that the urge to purge comes when I’m feeling a little out of control. I’m not talking in a control freak kind of way although M might disagree, I’m talking a not feeling in control of my own decisions and direction kind of way. The purge helps me declutter my mind, my physical space and everything to do with surviving another day in lockdown.

Control comes in many forms and more so-self control.

Part of me really wants to throw away 90% of everything. But the sensible part of me knows not too. Excepting t-shirts, I’ve already reduced my wardrobe down to less than half. I’ve even reduced my considerable t-shirt collection from eight IKEA tubs of neatly folded t-shirts down to six. That’s a reduction of at least 30 t-shirts.

I’ve done my morning flick through Instagram and unfollowed many of the accounts I saw. I’m happy to and do acknowledge that at one point it was important to me to follow these people, but right now, it’s not. I can always follow them again if I want or need to. The same goes for Twitter which I have visible most of the day.

I’ve been culling my Facebook friend list down over the last two years. I used to have nearly 900 Facebook “friends” at one point. Now, as each friend birthday notification is sent to me, I contemplate if I need or even want to have them on my friend’s list anymore. My current friend count is 730 and even that’s ridiculous. It’s an organic process with no fixed end date. Nearly every day of the year I’m faced with a list of “friends” whose birthdays it is. I scan through this list wishing those congratulations for surviving another year to those whom I would if I was in the same room with them and unfollowing the others. I’m sure they don’t miss me. On the rare case, someone actually noticed and messaged me, I’ve actually had a good conversation and reconsidered my decision.

I guess my aim is to eventually have a Facebook/Twitter/Instagram feed where what appears (besides the stupid sponsored posts) is 100% from those people whom I am genuinely interested in. Is it a just pipe dream?

Although not a full-on minimalist, I do agree with their line of thinking. Every time I look at something or an area I’m trying to find something I can get rid of. Desk, bedroom, children, garage etc. I’ll never get rid of everything, but there is a lot of things I can part with happily.

That’s it for now. Thanks for reading, I really appreciate your time and interest. Talk to you soon. Stay safe.

Richard

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