Muse
The reasons for having a hobby are easy to understand. It can be a social experience. A way of pursuing something we love that can't yet pay the bills. An escape from the burdens of life. A way of learning new skills. Preparation for a new career. Having a hobby is common enough, but they can be quite fragile to pressures from elsewhere in our lives. Work. Family. Sickness. Exhaustion. And practicing anything is a habit: we have to keep doing it to gain the most value from it. Losing the habit of practicing them can then mean that when things improve after a bad week, we realise two weeks later that we haven't gone back to it. And slowly we're edged away from something that matters to us. So how do we keep in touch with it? How do we keep practicing what we love when not even habit can be enough? It needs to be more than habit.
One of the advantages of understanding that I’m autisic has been that I’ve become accustomed to building a custom toolkit for life. This isn’t iconoclasm. It’s a requirement because the standard tools often don't make sense to me. It wasn’t until I had space to build custom tools that I was able to make progress in life. In eight years I went from living with family in a dead-end town to living in London, getting a job, making friends, getting an MA with distinction in Digital Asset Management (DAM) from King's College London, and rising two rungs on the career ladder in DAM. I’m now a product owner with a luxury brand. Building my own tools for years means that it’s a natural process now, ingrained such that I don't need to do it, to consciously switch it on. Instead, it often happens instinctively and begins to build by itself.
For exampe, it was at Petit Trianon that I adopted the estate and it’s most famous resident, Marie Antoinette, as a muse. Royalty has sponsored art all of kinds throughout history. Marie Antoinette long favoured Gluck and Vigée Le Brun, for example. The significance of this is that then everything I create is dedicated to her. There's a reason this site is called Ma Reine. So what might otherwise be a hobby enters a higher status realm, that of a duty. A duty persists where a hobby fades. So, I keep practicing photography and editing, and I keep learning from professionals because it’s now a duty. My diary has become a series of letters to Ma Reine which account for the progress I make in the pursuit of my duty. So that too keeps me practicing it when otherwise it might fade away.
And in pursuing these duties I've found my highest source of meaning and the greatest muse I could imagine. Ma Reine, The Petit Trianon, the estate, and the chateau as a whole have provided me with more inspiration than I could ever have imagined possible. They’ve given me photos of beautiful places to practice photo editing. As I’ve learned, I’ve returned to some of my earlier edits to see if I can do a better job, especially as I’ve developed a lighter touch in editing.
I hope this illustrates the benefit of taking a hobby and elevating it to the level of muse and duty. If it matters to you, then you need to enshrine it. It’s only been this that’s ensured that I’ve posted something on this site every day for six months, missing no more than three days over that time, and attending to my diary with the same regularity.
Photography has become my primary artistic discipline this year, so I’d like to share some of my favourite photos from Versailles with a note about the significance of each one and how I might improve upon it. My muse has been a beautiful one and I can't wait to find out all the ways I can capture her unmatched beauty in the coming year.
