Ten Seconds

Stillness and the noise around it

When I travel, I don’t document to perform. I document to anchor.

Recently in New Zealand, I spent just over a week moving through moments that felt almost mythic. A shark breaching the water beside where I was sitting. A long walk up a volcano. A descent into one of the deepest military tunnels in the world. Flora and fauna so vivid it felt rehearsed. At one point I slipped off a path and found myself scrambling down the side of a creek I had no intention of exploring — scared and exhilarated at the same time.

When something strikes me, I film ten seconds. I set the camera down and leave it still. No panning. No narration. No drama. Just ten seconds of one living frame.

It’s become a ritual.

An anchor.

A way of saying to myself: stay here.

Later, I stitched a few of those moments together for a friend. A simple video. Nothing grand. Just a small offering of beauty.

And then something strange happened.

I didn’t want to share it.

Not because I didn’t like it. Not because it wasn’t meaningful. But because I could already feel the projections forming before anyone had said a word.

Andy lives a privileged life.

Andy must be wealthy.

Andy doesn’t need to work.

Andy’s curating an aesthetic.

And I laughed when I caught it — this protective reflex. As if sharing beauty automatically turns it into branding.

The irony is that prior to coming, it had been a difficult few weeks. There was heaviness. There were tensions I have written about in previous posts. The shark breaching the water didn’t cancel any of that. It simply existed alongside it.

But social media rarely holds “alongside.”

It flattens.

When I’m in Jakarta, I take photos of trash. Overflowing gutters. Tangled electrical wires. Chaos. That’s what grips me there. It feels honest. When I’m in New Zealand, I take photos of volcanic ridgelines and prehistoric forests. That feels honest too.

The camera simply follows what moves me.

And every so often something crosses the threshold into “shareable.” But the moment I consider sharing it, a second layer appears — the layer of interpretation. The layer where what was once presence becomes presentation.

There’s something healthy about keeping beauty small. About sharing it only with people who know the full landscape of your life. The ones who understand that a volcano walk does not erase grief. That a breaching shark does not imply financial freedom. That ten seconds of stillness is not a lifestyle statement.

It’s just ten seconds.

Still.

I sent the video anyway.

Not as a declaration.

Not as a performance.

But as an experiment in allowing projection without trying to manage it.

Because maybe the deeper practice isn’t deciding what to share.

Maybe it’s learning not to curate myself around the imagined narratives of others.