Housekeeping

I’ve recently given myself homework, and I kept putting it off because it required me to speak with objective positivity about myself. I struggle with this, and I always have. I am typically the most self-depracating individual that I know. I try to justify it, saying things like, “If I own it, others can’t use it against me,” or I only give myself space to provide myself back-handed compliments. Meanwhile, I can typically find the positive in others when they aren’t always able to see it in themselves. Ironic, I know.

Hailie and I just celebrated our 2nd anniversary, and for those of you keeping score, that’s a total of eight years. Leap years don’t come around too often, so we get extra excited when they do. I took five full days away from the barber story so we could go to the hot springs, and just relax without any real responsibilities. I didn’t realize exactly how badly I needed this reset, but I’ll be heading back to work tomorrow a lot more refreshed than when I left on Wednesday.

The past year, I’ve been adding additional things to my daily routine to try and build a better me. Last year, I started working out for the first time in my life. I started with 30 minutes a day, 3 days a week, but now I'm doing at least an hour every day. You never get to see the progress until you have the opportunity to look back and see how far you’ve gone, so even though my goals still haven’t been met, I know the journey is one I can continue facing with progress.

With that train of thought, I have recently added 10 minutes of meditation to my morning. My guided meditations always begin with the same statement, “Set your intention for this meditation.” Having never spent any time in meditation, I truly didn’t understand what this meant, so I told myself, “I don’t want to be a cunt.” Needless to say, the meditation didn’t change that about me. The next day, the same statement, “Set your intention for this meditation.” I still don’t know what they want from me, so I repeat me newfound mantra, “I don’t want to be a cunt.” After 9 days of repeating this mantra every morning, I realized how stupid it was, but when I was asked once again to set my intention for the session, I found myself responding with a lot more cynicism than prior days. “I hope this meditation can provide me enough moments of clarity that I an take peace into my day and be less likely to be a cunt to everyone around me.”

There’s a lesson to be found in this. When you start meditating, you don’t know what you’re listening for. When you know what to listen out for, it will sound a lot like your own voice. I frequently trust my gut, and in the moment after a genuinely cynical statement, I immediately realized exactly what meditation was going to provide for me. In the time since, I’m working on changing the way I talk about myself, so now my focus is less about being a cunt to other people, and more about reframing how I looked at myself to be a cunt in the first place.

With all of that said, I have been doing some housecleaning and getting a few things updated that I’ve been putting off for a while. And on that note, I have gone ahead and updated the rest of the website to reflect my portfolio work, and I’ve added a price list for all the individual services I will be offering. I even updated my LinkedIn, it’s crazy.

As a reward for my good behavior, I got myself a present.

I know have the wide angle to round out my trio of workhorse lenses. I was originally going to hold off on getting this for a few more months, but I have my first wedding in June scheduled, so I wanted to have a few months to put it through the paces before the nuptials. If you’re interested in booking a session with me this spring, feel free to reach out and see what I have available.

-Chris