I want to talk to the people in the middle. Not the ones who have it figured out. Not the ones with the clean reinvention story… the before and after, the pivot that worked, the second act already in full swing. I want to talk to the ones who are still in the quiet part. The part nobody writes about. The part where you’re not sure yet. I know that place. I’ve been living in it for a while now. And I think there are more of us here than the highlight reels suggest.
The best thing about starting over — about pointing your camera at something entirely new — is that you don’t know what you’re looking at yet. The national parks I’m heading into are going to show me things I don’t have language for. Field Notes is where I find the language.
I’m not going to pretend I planned any of this. At 60, I was at the top of a career I’d spent four decades building. Lighting design, live production, events — I was good at it, I was busy, and I had no particular reason to stop. And then, for a combination of reasons that I’m still sorting through, I stopped. What followed wasn’t a crisis. It wasn’t a breakdown. It was something quieter and stranger than that — a long, slow look at what I actually wanted the next chapter to be. And the honest answer was: I didn’t know.