BACK IN MOTION
I didn’t disappear to find myself. For a while, I simply stopped moving.
This journal stayed empty for most of the summer.
I could tell you that I needed time to process things.
That I was integrating. Recalibrating. Becoming.
All very beautiful words.
The less beautiful truth is that, for a while, I simply stopped moving.
Foto: Kat Derler
At the end of June, I wrote The Landing. I wrote about nearly 3,000 skydives, the life I had built around intensity, and the growing suspicion that speed and depth were never the same thing.
I meant every word.
But it was not the whole story.
When you stop moving fast enough to escape yourself, the first thing you find is not always peace.
Sometimes, you find everything that has been waiting for you to slow down.
Some old parts of my life caught up with me this summer. Some questions became harder to avoid. A few things needed my attention more than another photograph, another post or another attempt to look as if I had everything under control.
Most of that does not belong here.
It belonged in conversations, in reflection and in the parts of life that do not need an audience.
But one thing does belong here:
For years, I had confused movement with intensity.
And when I finally let go of some of that intensity, I was no longer sure what movement actually felt like.
The answer turned out to be almost annoyingly ordinary.
I started training again.
Every day.
Forty minutes. Sometimes a little more.
Push. Pull. Rings. Core. Balance. Calisthenics. And increasingly ambitious negotiations with gravity.
Then I came back the next day.
And the day after that.
There was no grand transformation. No cinematic montage. Most mornings, it was simply me, some weights, a mat and parts of my body filing formal complaints.
A few days ago, I held an L-sit for ten seconds.
Ten seconds.
Nobody called. No magazine asked for an interview. The financial markets remained surprisingly calm.
But I knew what those fseconds meant.
They had not come from motivation.
They had come from returning.
Again and again.
Progress had not required another breakthrough or a new version of me. It required me to come back tomorrow.
That repetition slowly began to reach other parts of my life.
I started writing again.
I made decisions I had postponed.
I looked at my work differently.
And I found my way back to photography.
Although “back” is probably the wrong word.
I do not want to return to photography exactly as it was before.
Some of my older work will still appear. There are photographs sitting in my archive that I still like, that still feel true and that deserve to be seen simply because they are good photographs.
Old does not automatically mean irrelevant.
But the centre of my photography is changing.
I am less interested in producing images merely to stay visible. Less interested in feeding an online machine or forcing every photograph to prove its commercial value.
I want to make room for the images I would miss if I never made them.
Portraits that feel like encounters.
Street photographs that begin with curiosity.
Strange ideas that make little sense on a marketing plan.
Photographs that allow me to think, question, play and occasionally make something that stays.
Photography may take up less space online and a deeper space in my life.
That does not make it less important.
Probably the opposite.
It simply means that photography no longer has to carry everything. It does not have to be my entire identity, my complete business model and my permanent answer to the question of what comes next.
It can become personal again.
At the same time, two new projects have started taking more of my attention.
I am not going to explain them yet.
I have spent enough time talking about possibilities as if they already existed. This time, I want to do the work first.
Some of it is slowly moving towards stories, pages and perhaps a book.
Woomondo will have its place in what comes next.
That is enough of an announcement for now.
When something exists, I will show it.
Until then, I am working.
That may be the biggest change this summer has left behind.
I am becoming less interested in all the lives I could theoretically live and more interested in the one that is actually happening.
Less what if. More what is.
For a long time, what if was one of my favourite places.
What if I changed everything?
What if I left?
What if I finally started?
What if this became successful?
What if I failed?
You can spend years there without ever having to risk anything real.
What is is less spectacular.
I am training.
I am writing.
My photography is changing.
Two projects are being built.
Some things are still uncertain.
But uncertainty is no longer a reason to sit down and wait for clarity to arrive.
The direction ahead is surprisingly concrete: build a stronger body, finish work that matters, create more freedom around money and place, and leave enough room to actually experience the life I am building.
This journal will be part of that movement again.
Not as a place for finished answers or polished announcements.
As a place where I pay attention.
Where photographs, encounters, contradictions and unfinished thoughts are allowed to find a form before the algorithm asks what they are good for.
The silence here was not empty.
After a period of standing still, I started moving again.
Mostly away from the audience.
Mostly before there was anything to show.
The summer is almost over.
I have not figured everything out.
But I am moving again.
And this time, I am paying attention to where.
Images and Text © Sascha van der Werf
