Life events have sometimes forced me into considering where I am, what I’m doing, and what I want in the future.

My new book ‘The Sound of Snow’: Six years of winter. Six years of working towards something.

There have been life markers where I just know I’ve transitioned from child to adult. The recent loss of my dad is such a marker.

When you change career at 40 and start to run photographic tours as a living, you’re more aware of the transient nature of life. Being self employed you realise that:

Nothing.

Is.

Guaranteed.

You have to adopt a healthy dose of belief that things will just continue to work out.

You have to learn to live in the present moment more, and try to hold off worrying about the future so much, because the present is all any of us have.

You begin to understand that control of our futures is just an illusion.

I have never felt more alive than running my own business. It has always been a huge inspiration to me to find that things just have a way of working out, and ideas can grow in to solid reality.

But the last year has thrown many of us. We are all disorientated. For me, I think all the time ‘off’ has meant that I’ve become more reflective. Perhaps too much so. and I seem to have been going through a ‘life-review’ over the past nine months as a result.

It has not been something I intended, nor wished to do. But with all the free time, and the uncertainty of the future, I think it’s inevitable.

The thing that has surfaced for me, is that the most important thing for me to do while I am here:

is be as authentic as I can be.

I think that is what drives most of us when we are creating art. We all may think we want to make nice pictures, of win competitions, or whatever, but underneath it all: is a quest for something that matters. Something that means something.

Our own truth.