Some of my good friends and I were sitting on the back porch of a Mesa home the other night, a bit after dusk and we had cloves to smoke and bellies full of homemade food, and we were discussing perspectives.
A couple of us, myself included, are “what if?” people. We spend alot of time and reflection looking back at what could have happened had only this or that been different … and I don’t think we look at that with regret as much as we do curiosity. Some other people in the group, myself strongly excluded, look at things with a “so what if what if would have happened? It didn’t.” These people are the ones always looing towards their futures and the possibilities that are out there.
I like to look at things such as my trip to Israel or this job I hold or this relationship I’m in and trace them all back to their origins … the fact that Jamie Mulhern convinved me to go to Israel and that Ryan Lombard introduced me to Brenden Roe who helped me get a job at University of Phoenix or that Carrie at Starbucks introduced me to Justin and how all that came about … and then I like to dissect those events and think about what would have happened if just one of the hundreds of things along the way would have been altered.
As part of my reflection last night and my continual looking back at time, I realized all the places I had been the last six months. Six months ago today I was with Tim Trainor aboard the Queen Mary in Long Beach, bumming around to kill time in Southern California. Three months ago today I was in Haifa, Israel, and took this photo on my first night out on Ben Gurion Street. Two months ago today I was with Justin, Sparkles, and Ryan Larue in downtown Portland, browsing the shelves at Millenium Music.
Good times. I’m also in a bit more reflective of a mood then I usually am because I am working on compiling all of my traveling photographs onto a new photo-displaying software developed by David Mulhern. Right now I am about halfway through loading all the Israeli trip pictures and not even an eighth through the descriptions, and am also making the galleries for Phoenix, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, and Toronto. A feeling and even a scent seem to accompany every picture. And sometimes its hard or interesting to stop at a picture and realize what I didn’t know, what had just recently happened, and what was soon to happen.
Right now I feel on top of it all, but six months from now I will look back on this moment and realize that I was just as lost.
Posted by sharoute 
