Daily Archives: July 11, 2013

At least four times a day someone asks, “What Now?”   I can understand the curiosity.  Maybe people want to know what they will do when they retire, maybe they really wonder what I will do, though I find that hard to imagine, why would anyone care what I did?!   So, if you are the one person in the universe that really does want to know, here goes!  First,  life does not fundamentally change just because a person no longer has a 9-5 job, it doesn’t mean you loose your drive to do anything of value. In my case the drive is even greater, because what I want to do of value, I’ve been doing for most of my life. It’s really pretty simple, I hope that when I leave a place I will leave it better than I found it. Not because of what I can do, but because of what He can do through me.  The only way to help others make their lives better is love them with His love.

 

Then there is family and friends.  I’ve not always had as much time for them as I wanted to have.  If someone sends you a check every two weeks, they attach certain responsibilities to them, now my first concern can be my family.  No one, except someone who has traveled for a living, can know just how precious that time is going to be to me.

 

Photography is the next great joy in my life, and now I can pursue it with complete freedom.  I am proud to have worked for Nikon, but I am thrilled to be a free moral agent now.  I will enjoy reviewing gear and offering my humble opinion of it’s value to the photo community. It will be fun to evaluate lots and lots of toys, with no axe to grind!

 

Best of all is the relief from the pressure, reports, emails, requests to travel places you don’t really want to go, long hours in airports, on airplanes, waiting for client to show up, driving thousands of miles, sorting, and doing inventories of thousands of pieces of gear.  Will I miss that stuff?  Nope. Will I miss the people. sure, but I can still call them and run into them out in the real world, my new real world!

 

A blessed man,

 

the pilgrim