Picure by me.

Don’t dwell on the unchangeable. Deal with it.

It’s 11am and raining.

Today, at 9:30 am, shortly after getting to my office at the Charles Darwin Research Station in Galapagos, I noticed something odd about my Hard Drive: it’s wasn’t opening on my laptop. Now, as a fairly peaceful photographer, I told myself it’s got to be the cable, or something easily fixable.

After several attempts with some USB-C cables (I swear those are becoming a thing), I came to the unfortunate conclusion that I wasn’t going to be accessing those pictures and files anytime soon.

Sometimes, you just can’t control your environment. The key to happiness in this case is accepting that.

Having my entire two months of video and photo on that Hard Drive, my first and natural instinct was to panic. I had invested my entire summer in a now non-existent project.

I decided to give myself something to do and rushed to the closest thing that could offer me peace and instant joy: the coffee machine. Two latte’s had ought to do it.

Wrong.

At this point I was shaking partly from the stress, but mostly from the two coffees. It was also at this moment that I was given the best advice I could get: take a walk, get some fresh air, relax.

I don’t know if it was the rain, but pulling out my camera and walking among the marine iguanas and mangroves on the beach truly disconnected me from the crash I had experienced earlier.

And this is what I was meaning to get to. I believe that at the base, all humans (at least in first world countries) need to connect with nature at least a little bit in life. I had noticed that I had dived so deep down into my photography and design that I had forgotten that I was in the cradle of evolution!

I had forgotten where I was. I was stuck in a hole so deep I couldn’t see the light.

So that’s the advice I had for you right now. Take a walk, appreciate your environment while you still have it because in some way or another, it’s beautiful and there’s always something new to discover.

This is my first post on Medium so I don’t expect this to be well written or anything. But I do expect to be writing some more!

If you’ve gotten to the end of this post, thanks for reading, I hope you enjoyed it and if not, please tell me how I could be more effective!

Cheers,

Emile

)
Emile R. J. Patry Blenkiron

Written by

Product designer living & working remotely in Canada. Student in Global Business and Digital Arts with a minor in Economics at the University of Waterloo.

Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade