Extending the Timeline

Lilly Light | A glacier lilly takes the spotlight in the upper Rattlesnake neighborhood of Missoula.

Since the first blog post, nearly two months ago, I’ve skipped out on three more backpacking trips. PT continues and the hip/knee pain is improving.

The worst pain has been the mental anguish of overthinking this entire enterprise (and the pain). It is an internal battle of expectations rooted in perfect execution versus, well, reality. The gap between these two, I’m learning, is filled with unnecessary suffering. I hold on too tightly to the belief that perfectionism has gotten me this far so it must be working. It’s all I know. And, with it, I’ve come to know way more suffering than any middle-class American who has experienced minimal loss should. I won the life lottery, at yet, I suffer. Why?

In moments of clarity, when I am sitting quietly in nature and my awareness is fully tuned to the happenings of the meadowlark or late day sidelight on harsh paintbrush, I know why. Fear. What I want to happen, the part of me that has perfected the future, is limited to my narrow understanding of what the future could be based on past experience. And that past experience, for me, since I was little, has been rooted in worry. In fear. My flights of perfection are attempts at controlling my future within that narrow, but safe, framework. And it is exhausting.

This past week, I processed 14 images for mural-sized printing. The project has been weighing on me since it was first introduced a couple of years ago. It is outside of wheelhouse. The largest prints I make usually max out around 40”x60”. These murals are nine feet tall and range from 12-37 feet wide. What’s more, because they will be on walls, they must be reasonably detailed without too many strange artifacts at short viewing distances. When I sat down at my desk with six empty days ahead of me to process these images, a cold sweat broke out. The gulf between what I knew at that moment about upscaling images for murals and where I needed to be in a week’s time to deliver the images to the client was impossibly vast.

The files are now off to the client. I don’t know if they will be satisfied, but I know I tried my best and learned a ton along the way. Perfectionism be damned.

The last couple of months, though filled with mental anguish, have been illuminating. This project is going to take much longer than expected and I think that's the point. It can't be rushed. It must move at the speed of life, not an artifical timeline. I gotta get back to listening to the meadowlark and watching the late day sun dip below the horizon. It need not be a big Wilderness trip. A walk in Greenough Park will do for now. Freedom lies in wonder, wherever nature meets the senses.