Monochrome expressions of Evan - thinking of you

Let me start by saying that while these photos are of Evan (they seem to be a set) what's written here is about you, and how I perceived you on that fantastic night of the sixteenth of October, 2009. It was amazing, a delight, a terrific fascination seeing you Josh. You felt to me so calm and strong and grown, with a fabulous balance of seriousness and humour (one of lifes engrossing challenges, it seems: what to take utterly to heart, and what to see the funny side in). If indeed this is how you are increasingly feeling, I really hope that it is something that you are proud of (in the positive sense of the word - not the sense that it is warned against by at least two major religions; I mean it here as quietly confident, humbly satisfied, reassured, self-affirmed) because yours has been very much a journey against the grain, uphill, windswept. And that is why I said to you, your mom would have been so delighted, so utterly delighted by you, indeed amazed, I'm sure. I talked to my beautiful friend Steven D recently. We laughed that we are at this forty age, which in it's own way means so little and so much; so little because you know if you are fortunate enough to live to be something older than that - you might look back and think how young you were, and how much you had still to experience and learn (this has happened to me throughout, so I see no reason to think that it would abruptly stop now in recognition of a particular calendar point). But it means so much too, because there is this nagging sense, a hint, a whiff of suggestion on the air, that maybe you have become everything that you are going to become, and my god is it not so entirely unexceptional? So for me to see someone as young as you are, and again it's all perspective, and so from my perspective, going on sixteen is young (it must be, because you got there so fast) but yet you have such an ease about you it seems to me, such a purpose and quiet wisdom; an increasing comfort in your own skin. And I think that is something profound, and something worth working for and thinking about and jelously guarding - self knowledge and confidence - the jet fuel of opportunity. And in case you think I've got depressed or defeatist - Ive not at all - and I think (certainly hope) that discovery and reinvention of purpose and potential does not stop at forty, or sixty, or eighty for that matter - because I think it is the real business of living, rather than just existing. And one of the things that I like and admire about little Ev at the moment is his unposed authenticity, and hence my choice of this set of photos for my note to you here (I could however shoot myself for not taking a thousand pictures of you - they would be such treasures to have).

I feel it has been much too long since I saw you, and I'm sorry about that. And this was far too short, and in many ways an artificial setting - but I am so thankful for those moments too. I saw briefly some special people in my life in Jhb and Cape Town - some of them for the first or second time in 8, 10, 15 years. And experiences change all before them - no doubt - the longer the time the greater the wealth of experience.