a non-wasted life
Walter Mitty, whales, and world travel
As a teenager, my biggest fear was a wasted life. When I finally reached the end, I would look back and see nothing made of my years. At the time, my life was filled with schoolwork and studying, mostly focused on getting into college in the hopes that my life would become more exciting. It was good motivation, but the uncertainty of the future alongside the ordinariness of my life was agonizing. My guts would tie themselves into knots, with a question beneath it all, What if these boring days in the suburbs were all that I would ever have?
In my worst moments, I would turn to my comfort movie, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. The namesake character lives an extraordinarily boring existence, mostly focused on his work in the photography department for a magazine. He gets through life by abandoning reality in favor of elaborate daydreams of being a completely different person — someone bolder or more courageous or simply more interesting. He sees himself talking back to the rude manager, becoming a world traveler, falling in love.
I may have been 17 years old, but I related to this 40-year-old man who had been working a boring white-collar job for 16 years. I would lie in bed, imagining what life could be like one day, when I had the courage to leave the comfort of home, to be more sociable, to be confident enough to see what existed beyond my hometown.
Fortunately for Walter, his boring existence comes to an end when he misplaces an important photograph. He decides that he must track down his adventurous photographer to find it. In the ensuing journeys, Walter is forced to become a new person, someone more interesting and adventurous than his daydreams, as he chases the elusive photographer across the world. The office worker travels from Greenland to Iceland to Afghanistan, jumping from helicopters, longboarding down mountains, and backpacking through warzones.
It’s no wonder that in college, I got into photography in pursuit of a non-wasted life. I took my brother’s old camera, the one that he used to capture his backpacking trip across Europe, and imagined myself as a travel photographer. I took hundreds of photos of my campus, even more during my trips to visit my brother in San Francisco. I was able to see the world in more detail through the viewfinder, as I hunted for dramatic shadows and subtle architectural details. My brother took our family on vacations to Europe, and I captured London and Nice, even as I feared the unfamiliarity of international travel.
And then, the pandemic came. I found myself living in my parents home again, waiting for another life again. After glimpses of another life, I could barely stand the waiting, no longer able to dissociate myself from the present in hopes of experiencing a better future. I read books about Buddhism and mindfulness, I watched self-help videos, I sought to find joy in every moment, and let myself experience deep pleasure from things like pacing around my house or working out with resistance bands or spreading almond butter on rice cakes. It was nice.
When vaccines and a more normal world arrived, my life didn’t feel like it changed that much. I met new people and made passing friendships, I tried new things. Yet life eventually turned monotonous, and I did my best to enjoy it. I was happy enough, most of the time, but I would find myself getting bored now and again, trying to convince myself that a consistent and simple life was plenty.
But again, my brother would drag me and my family on trips to Europe, trips that I would dread and enjoy, despite anxiety about logistics, language barriers, and the unknown. Dutifully following his itineraries, we went to Germany, to Denmark, to Spain, to Japan. With each trip, the world seemed less scary and more familiar, like something that was meant for me, rather than something I was intruding upon.
I rewatched Walter Mitty on Saturday after a day at sea. We had gone on a whale watching cruise into the Atlantic, eyes trained on the waves, looking for the movement of humpbacks feeding or breathing. We saw glimpses of one repeatedly: a splash made by the edge of his tail, a spout from his blowhole. But I couldn’t get a good picture of him. Instead, I took hundreds of photos of what was more easily visible. The sea, strangers, the sunset. The blue ocean turned golden as the sun moved west, the waning light turning our fellow passengers into silhouettes.
Watching the film on the couch after returning home, I was more interested in Sean than I’d been on previous watches. The adventurous photographer that Walter followed across the world, a self-assured traveler who was relentless in his quest to see beautiful things — he had seemed so incomprehensibly cool in the past. I thought about my upcoming travel plans to visit four different countries, how I was excited about them instead of afraid, how I would capture images of new faces, new sunsets, new scenes, and the familiar faces of those I loved among it all.
💧 Drops of the Week 💧
ALBUM - The Secret Life of Walter Mitty Soundtrack - lots of great tracks on here
POEM - “Palm” by W.S. Merwin - The palm is in no hurry / to be different