Dialogue

When life gets ahead of you

It hasn’t been easy, but I refuse to complain. Please don’t take my writing as such. I’m just observing, recording, venting—trying to make sense of it all. And the result, so far? I'm bursting with energy, sometimes.

Mitchel Lensink
Dec 14, 2024
6 min read

Patient (hopefully) readers,

I'm writing this while waiting for the machine to start brewing my morning coffee. Breakfast is also cooking in the toaster. I just tried to turn on the lights in the kitchen's extractor hood and was reminded that the halogen lamps inside died last week. I've been meaning to fix them but ran out of spare lamps, so now it requires a trip to the hardware store. That turns a relatively simple task into something I have no idea when I'll squeeze into my schedule. I could've ordered the lamps online, but they'd have taken two days to arrive—and that felt too slow. Of course, it's now been nine days since they broke, so in hindsight, the online option would’ve been faster.

The same goes for the old bed that's been sitting in my office for the past month and a half. We recently got a new bed—or rather, Charlotte's mum gifted it to us (a special shoutout to her for that). But the household waste company that collects old furniture didn’t have any openings for at least a month. That felt too long to wait, so I planned to drive the old bed there myself. The problem is, we drive a 2004 Toyota Yaris that can't even fit one part of the bed frame, let alone the whole thing. It’s been about six weeks since I checked the waste collection dates, and the original one has long passed. Once again, the "quicker" solution turned out to be the slower one. Meanwhile, I’ve been living with a broken bed sitting in my home office.


I’m making lasagna tonight, so I need to run to the store to grab ingredients. Might as well pick up those lamp replacements on the way while I'm at it. Cooking is usually easier when you can see what you're doing.


The lasagna is prepped and ready to go into the oven later today. The lamps didn’t work, though—I must've bought the wrong ones—so I had to operate in darkness after all. I meant to sit down at my computer to catch up with some personal to do's but I didn't sleep much last night so I'm too tired to sit or stand. Which means I'm writing this while laying down on the couch. One of the cats is taking advantage of the situation and has curled up on top of me. It's cold in this house, I get why he snuggles up. Perhaps turning up the heating just a little bit should make life more comfortable. Perhaps a hot shower is in place as well. Yes, let's do that. I don't know about you guys, but for me a good hot shower can act as a mental reset button. A way to break free from the troubles of earlier by, quite literally, washing them away.


About my personal to-do list: I’ve been slacking on that, too. I'm halfway through my 2023 personal yearbook but lack the inspiration to finish it. I should also start looking at the image selection for my 2024 yearbook but I don't like starting new projects when the previous ones haven't been finished yet. The same goes for my fine art print and portfolio selects. Though, honestly, I should probably finish editing all my images from November before I can even think about the rest. I took so many images last month—almost as many as the rest of the year combined. I thought I’d been less trigger-happy lately, but clearly not. Maybe I just need to stop overthinking and let my hands do the work. That's the only way it gets done.


Mt Hood, as seen from the Timberline Lodge restaurant at Sunset. The lights you see in the distance are of the Snowcat braving the mountain to maintain the snow after the first skiing day of the season.

A full week has passed since I wrote those words above. It’s now December 14th, and this is officially the latest I’ve ever been with a newsletter. The past few weeks—months, really—have been a delicate balancing act of prioritization and letting some things take longer than usual. Sadly, this newsletter has taken the biggest hit so far. Although, those halogen lamps are still not replaced either, despite the product page being open on my phone’s browser since Tuesday. The bed is still in the home office, but I’ve finally scheduled its pickup for the 20th. I’m also still nowhere near done editing my November photos, so I should really be doing that instead of beating myself up about this newsletter entry that's clearly not going to be a better story by making it longer than what it is right now.

On the plus side, which I say tongue in cheek, I haven't shot a single image in December so far. That saves time editing at the end of December, which is in two weeks already. Heck, the end of the year is in two weeks already. What happened to the past eleven months? It's like life got away from me. As if, no, not 'as if,' because I have not been making my own schedule. Life has been living me, not the other way around.

It hasn’t been easy, but I refuse to complain. Please don’t take my writing as such. I’m just observing, recording, venting—trying to make sense of it all. And the result, so far? I'm bursting with energy, sometimes, almost as if I might explode, but I'm too mentally drained to do the simplest tasks. I can't be bothered but feel guilty about that at the same time. I'm sure this is all just one of those phases that you sometimes have to battle through to realize its value, but I'm also second guessing every second of my waking moments because I'm of course not sure of that. I'm a thirty two year old man but I feel like a kid, in a world that's too large and small at the same time. Though it's starting to feel more like the latter lately.

I know my tone has been less than cheerful and I think that's totally fine. It's okay to be honest with yourself—even publicly, as I’m doing here. How do I plan to emerge from all of this, you might wonder? God, I hope that's what you wonder. Because I will emerge. With better energy, better understanding, and more things to discover. Maybe I’ll take that mental reset shower again, get out of my head, let my hands do the work, and see what’s next.

The relief of the United Kingdom, as seen from the plane from PDX to AMS. I'll never get tired of images taken from airplane windows.

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