Less Strive, More Thrive, in 2025

It’s funny how we compartmentalize years, as if we could categorize and label our woes or joys, put them in a box, and label it with a year—the way I label hard drives full of photos. Whether or not we acknowledge the illusion of time, many of us embrace it, whether for comfort or convenience, myself included. That illusion acknowledged, 2024 began as a comedy of errors, a road of trials, a parade of misfortunes, bad luck leading to worse, with so many turns of ill fortune that I tired of recounting them before losing track of their number.

But the wheel of fortune did turn in 2024. No misfortune-born obstacle proved insurmountable, and the last quarter of the year yielded exciting new work and a once-in-a-lifetime trip to the UK with friends of exceeding kindness and generosity.

As the old year ended and the new one began, I spent two sleepless weeks, from Christmas to present, coughing my lungs out with a regular old pre-pandemic era cold. This is the breed of cold you get immediately after you’ve focused intensely on something for an extended period.

It was one of those sicknesses that saps you of all energy, all motivation, all drive but the drive to rest enough well enough to fight again another day.

Or maybe not fight.

Lost Lessons from the Lost Years

In March 2020, we were collectively forced to stop. I remember that first wave of relief from the overwhelm. We all looked at one another and realized how exhausted we were from the constant hustle. We vowed to be more mindful of our habits, our work-life balance, our relationships. And we waited for the pandemic to ease so that we could put our newfound lessons to use. We’d be better humans after the pandemic. Less stressed. More balanced. More invested in our relationships. We’d place more value in the things that truly mattered. Once the pandemic was over, we were going to be different.

And we did try, for a time at least. But, gradually over the following two years, the old order returned; we went back to work and airtight schedules. With airtight schedules, however, there’s no allowance for play, for improvisation or spontaneity. A lot of us went back to the pre-pandemic hustle, striving to fulfill ourselves and our dreams.

Striving

In 2024, I strived. I tried hard to meet my goals. I programmed my play time and rest time according to a schedule and let go of spontaneous interests and intuitive discovery. And I strived for control over a world that felt like it would fall to pieces if I turned my attention away for a second.

Along with this, I desperately strived to please people. Not just clients, but friends. Not just friends but the abstract, collective community of people I know and don’t know on social media. I sure spent a lot of time in 2024 worrying about what other people would think of what I did, said, didn’t say, or didn’t do. Back in the twentieth century, we would have recognized this for the waste of time and energy that it is.

Thriving

If my 2024 goal was to maintain a solitary focus and get things done, in 2025, I just want to make a mess of fun projects and remember what it was like to have a good time making things. Lower the stakes. I’m always striving to do right by my people and right by my projects. And while that won’t stop, it can be a tall order for a non-genius person like me. Geniuses and virtuosos and dynamic, charismatic influencers can do what they do. I’ll be over here in the midst of imperfection, doing my best; relinquishing a little control; trying to have a better time doing it.

That’s part of the reason I’m no longer bound to the idea of a weekly, scheduled Traveller post in 2025. But at the same time, I’ll still be here, and the Traveller will continue, perhaps with a more personal tone for the New Year. I hope to see you here.

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Steven Townshend is a fine art/portrait photographer and writer with a background in theatre, written narrative, and award-winning game design. As a young artist, Steven toured the US and Canada performing in Shakespeare companies while journaling their moments on paper and film. In his transition from stage to page, Steven continued to work as a theatre photographer, capturing dramatic scenes while incorporating elements of costume, makeup, and theatrical lighting in his work. Drawn to stories set in other times and places, Steven creates works through which fellow dreamers and time travelers might examine their own humanity or find familiar comfort in the reflections of the people and places of a distant era.

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I’m Steven Townshend—your guide, scribe, editor, and humble narrator. The All Worlds Traveller is my personal publication, an exploratory conversation about stories and how we interact with them, from photographs to narratives to games—a kind of variety show in print. It is a conversation with other artists who explore the past, the future, and the fantastical in their work. Not one world—but all worlds. Where Distant Era shows stories in images, The All Worlds Traveller is all about the words.

Distant Era creates fine art and portrait photographs of people and places from imagined pasts, possible futures, and magical realities. In collaboration with other artists, we evoke these distant eras with theatrical costume and makeup, evocative scenery, and deliberate lighting, and we enhance them with contemporary tools to cast these captured moments in the light of long ago or far away. We long to walk the lion-decorated streets of Babylon, to visit alien worlds aboard an interstellar vessel, and to observe the native dances of elves. Our images are windows to speculative realities and postcards from the past. They are consolation for fellow time travelers who long to look beyond the familiar scenery of the present and gaze upon the people and places of a distant era.