We caught up with the brilliant and insightful David Page a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
David, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. It’s always helpful to hear about times when someone’s had to take a risk – how did they think through the decision, why did they take the risk, and what ended up happening. We’d love to hear about a risk you’ve taken.
Isn’t life taking a risk? You take a risk each time you walk out your front door. Plus, it’s only a risk if you fear the uncertainty and only focus on the negative possibilities. I am only 52 and last year I left a career of twenty two years because it was diametrically opposed to my spiritual being. I was risking my well-being and family’s well-being if I stayed in the job with the only positive being an income stream. Some might say I took a risk at early retirement, but I saw it much riskier to stay.
There is no guarantee in life other than your death. It is guaranteed and will come to us all one day. We don’t know when, but when you become aware of its existence you learn how to live. You define your purpose, know your spirituality is what is of ultimate importance to you in life, and choose to do things that nourish your soul. My goal is to feel whole with all aspects in my life thriving. I’m not promoting quitting your job and becoming that river guide you’ve always wanted to be, but with some planning and the right mind-set you begin to see where your life can take you.
I don’t say I am retired, because to me the word conjures up having enough money to sit around in the backyard on a hammock sipping lemonade without a care in the world. This is an illusion and I like to live in reality. The reality I’ve chosen to live in is one of my own choosing. You have to put in the work because it’s not easy or everyone would be doing it. There are roadblocks to overcome, fear to help project you in the right direction, and so many unknowns you can’t predict or prepare for. However, with a little planning you are able to course correct and adapt when needed. Plus, know what you do now is what you’ll be doing later in life.
Since leaving my job last year I haven’t picked up any new skill or hobby. I’m doing what I’ve always done and seeing what opportunities come my way. I have a newsletter on Substack where I post about two times a month and the loose theme is writing about my life’s current journey. Writing for others is new to me, but writing I’ve been doing in the form of journaling or brain dumping for over twenty five years. Also, just in the past few months I have begun to launch my fine art photography business. Nature photography and being immersed in natural places is nothing new for me. I have been exposed to nature my whole life with photographing its beauty happening for me nearly twenty two years ago. I’m exploring my life skills and experience with an awareness of my existence more in line with my spiritual being. My true self pursuit.
So not taking a risk is taking a risk at missing your appointment with life. If there is something brewing in you then do it now. What we do now has a tremendous influence on what we do later in life. Don’t wait, take risks.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers?
As a boy growing up there were two things I always wanted yet never received. A camera and a foot locker. A foot locker? Yes, one of those old black ones with metal or tin trim and a big old lock latch. To this day I can’t really remember why I desired a piece of furniture as a kid. The camera was another desire of mine for many years but I never really pushed my parents for one. As time passed I dabbled in finding an artistic outlet for myself. Music began at an early age for me but I quickly learned I didn’t have an ear for it nor the patience. Other outlets included drawing classes and as a young adult, writing and a horrendous attempt making “spiritual” wall hangings with wood and rice paper as my medium. The wall art lasted only a few months.
Today I continue to write and you guessed it I photograph the natural world among other things that inspire me. Living in New York City while in my twenties was my first real experience with camera and film. My roommate had an SLR he would let me borrow. I would walk around the city taking mostly black and white photographs. It was a hobby that continued even after I got married because my wife had an old Yashica SLR which I used to start my nature photography when we moved to California. Today photography is no longer a hobby, but an obsession to capture my experiences in photographs.
I am a photographer pursuing nature’s meditative properties. Photography helps keep me presently aware while nature bathing, whether deep in the woods of Maine or along the coast of San Diego, and to the trails, mountains and deserts of California. I see natures calming effect on my being and it’s healing powers both physically and emotionally. Spending time in nature and photographing these moments remind me how precious the gift of life is and how grateful I am for my existence.
My photography is a gift of meditative time for you to immerse yourself in the natural world through my art hung on your wall. I have enjoyed and immersed myself in the prints I have up on our home’s wall for years. A small escape into nature always reminds me of what’s important in life. A well composed photograph is one you can truly look into and be transported away from your own trivialities in life to take a moment and know how good life truly is.
As a Writer:
I’ve been journaling for over 20 years. The conscious decision to do so started in my young adulthood. The same time I left a career in advertising with the goal of earning a degree in healthcare. I was leaving the comfort of a paying job, healthcare insurance, and the illusion of order in my life. I would now be recognizing the true chaos that surrounded me. With chaos came transformation based on the recognition of my personal self and how I was going to experience this new chapter in my existence. The voluntarily approach to look inward, to know myself and put the work in to gain order in this new world I was creating for myself was my intention. To stop looking outward for answers on my own being or even to solve my own personal problems.
Writing about it is honoring the process and your past. It allows you to see where you’ve come to in your being and personal growth. It’s a reminder sometimes to stay the course you set for yourself. It’s truly a narrative you have to see to become very clear on who you are and want to be. It helped me tremendously in the art of being me.
To write what is on your mind is to voluntarily approach the chaos in your head (and life) and learn to overcome by quieting your mind and becoming clear in thought. Have faith in yourself and honor your past because it indirectly prepares you for the approach you bring to your life struggles. Journaling about the multitudinous thoughts and feelings that pass through your mind helps with achieving mental clarity to keep you focused on what really matters to you.
Awareness of life can be done with enthusiasm, adventure, and mediation. Journaling is a concentrated situation where what you are doing is the same as meditation. Fill your life with the awareness of your own existence.
It is my intention to help others create lives of conscious awareness and contentment. I haven’t found a straight forward way to communicate this yet. However, you are the light in oneself and my purpose is to give you all I know to assist you in finding the trail that best fits you. You have to be your own guiding light to achieve what you want.
Through my newsletter and nature photography I hope to inspire others towards a conscious awareness.
Is there mission driving your creative journey?
My intention is to feel whole. Feeling is the best indicator of the best you. Leaving my career of 22 years in healthcare at age 52 was the realization that it was now diametrically opposed to my spiritual being. I am in a place of contentment in my life right now.
For years I did everything I could to make my professional choice all worth while. In a sense I sought ways to love my job again, mostly by re-inventing myself within the job itself. This ability dried up for me about 5 years ago and last October I decided I had had enough. The phrase that kept popping in my head was “I am done.”
How do you leave careers you’ve been in for over 20 years? Is it all you know or is it the fear of leaving the perspective of all you know? Plus, when you have kids, a mortgage, and bills to pay do you truly realize how daunting a task leaving your career can be. This fear turns into a paralyzing reality to remain where you are and serve your current career to solely make money. We all have done it sometime or another because we had to, but to what end? Do we stay with the only focus to keep our current incomes and a lifestyle we are accustomed to or do we find other income streams doing things that also bring us health, wellbeing and contentment.
My goal in telling this story isn’t to get you to quit your job and become the painter or musician or a river guide you were meant to be. On the contrary, this is for me. I know I wouldn’t just quit my job, especially where I am at now in life. That’s crazy, right? So why was this time for me different? How was I able to leave my career and branch off and start a new adventure in my life. Easy…just kidding. It’s not easy, if it was we would all be doing it. However, a new perspective on life is a start which is how I got started. The Pandemic truly opened my eyes to who I wanted to be. Remember, this is just the perspective part, only the start to move towards change or transition in one’s life. We all have a perspective on life or ourselves and it is based on what we make up, but it is also based on what we may think how others perceive us. We are all influenced by external forces. We can’t avoid it. Since the day we are born the view of who we are and what we are going to do in this world is heavily influenced by external forces. I’ve found to gain new perspective is to seek knowledge outside of this status quo you have created for yourself.
To see what is out there beyond the world created for you. I am a college graduate, professionally licensed, had a career for 26 years, have a family, took my 17.2 vacation days per year, maintain health insurance, have a mortgage, 3 car payments, and pay all my bills on time each month. I am doing what I am supposed to do. Yes, I am. But I also did what I wasn’t supposed to do. Instead of filling my leisure time with endless entertainment opportunities or frivolous spending, I spent my 20’s obsessively reading perspectives on life very different from my own. I understand that life is a process and in that process I have explored how I feel with eating, movement and spiritual practices. In my 30’s and 40’s I experienced these perspectives through creative endeavors, adventures with varying degrees of physicality, movement exploration, learning nutritional needs based on me, and knowing every act I do is a rite so I better bring full awareness to the best of my ability when performing said rites. Also, during these times I was honing my skills as a nature photographer and writer. In a sense, I was preparing for this exact moment in my life.
I am lucky to be in a position where I have some pension money that will hold us financially for a couple of years and my wife’s businesses are turning a small, but promising profit. I have always been very good at budgeting, which I do daily and have for thirty plus years now. We have lived on some very tight budgets over the years with us really enjoying a little more freedom in the later years, especially this current year we are planning on a few big trips we have put off in the past because of lack of time and money. We have the opportunity to take advantage of our situation and are in a good mind-set, one of abundance when it comes to both time and money. In a few years if we have to tighten up our spending we will with no regrets, especially if it allows us to stay on the trails we are on right now. The ones that our guiding us to who we want to be and allowing us to do things that provide us the best health and wellbeing we can give ourselves. This is the trail we will continue to take letting the process flow and seeing where it takes us. For some, this might look like one of uncertainty, but isn’t life uncertain? There is no guarantee in life except death. Sure I am doing what I need to “to get out there” with my current business development, but I am in a place where I can take my time. It is nice to take my time. It’s good to be alive.
Can you open up about how’d you funded your business?
You’ll never be ready was the best advice I got for my current transition in life.
Yes, I was ready to leave my career I no longer enjoyed, but was I really ready? Probably the best advice I got just before I left my career as a Respiratory Therapist and plunged face first into this life transition. It was given to me by someone who knows by confirmation through his own experience of leaving a career when he had had enough and is now about eight years in thriving at age 68.
Scary to think about it like that, especially if it’s a big one like leaving the comfort of a stable job and paycheck. It did confirm the reality of uncertainty in the life we lead allowing me to make a more informed decision about where I wanted to go. That is where I was, looking for the right guidance to make a decision based on the reality of my life where the only thing keeping me in a job was money, while everything else was suffering. So hearing those words that I’ll never be ready, especially anytime you jump into the unknown, wasn’t scary for me. It was refreshing.
Unconventional wisdom or a different perspective can help us see the world through beginner’s eyes again and permeate our general outlook on life. There is plenty of conventional wisdom out there keeping you from doing what you need to do to thrive as a human being. Don’t get me wrong, conventional wisdom especially when it comes to money is a huge factor for a lot of things we all do. We work to live. However, I have given our financials the attention they needed for me to be able to leave my career when I did and concentrate on just the living part for now.
My wife and I worked in healthcare for over 20 years each. We put money away for retirement and I was lucky to be in a position where I could draw off my pension at age 50. I was 51 last year when I left my career in healthcare and decided to take the lump sum to fund me and my wife’s creative endeavors.
Retirement is just a word for me. I’m still defining it as I go through this current transition in my life. The idea that there is a pile of money at the end of the tunnel is not my current reality. Instead, I see a pile of experiences now in what I am doing, not what I might get from it in the distant future. It’s about the process for me and what it brings me now. However, with life experience and each “retirements” in your life, there is always the possibility of new endeavors based on feeling whole.
The trail taken is the meaning and the goal.
To think I am guaranteed anything in the distant future is not a mind-set I operate on. The only guarantee in my mind is death. Recognizing that allows you to recognize your life in the present moment. Do plan for the future, but know what you do now greatly influences your future self. Do now what you want to be doing in the future.
You don’t just magically wake up many years from now in a “retired” mind set at whatever age you may be and say I’m going to do everything I didn’t get to do when I was working. Trust me on this when I say I’m not doing anything remotely different now than from what I have been doing my whole life. My pursuits now were my pursuits back then.
I write now because I’ve been creatively writing and brain dumping for twenty five years. Mostly for myself over those years, but some in connection with my union activities. It helped strengthen the voices of those most in need of a more livable wage, benefits and working conditions. I definitely learned the power of the written word during those times.
I want my writing to cause change in others and in myself. When writing for myself its change within me I am trying to provoke. Even as I write now I am doing it for me first and foremost. However, it is hoped for those willing to read what I have to say that you might gain some new perspective on life and use it to better your own existence. What I am telling you, I am telling myself to stay true to the self I want to be. What I preach is what I have confirmed through my experiences. Self enlightenment is up to the individual.
Hobbies are more than hobbies. Exploring and having small hobbies now coupled with life experiences can lead to starting a business when you have a little capital to spend in your later years. Even a part time stress free job is a great way to generate a small income stream. My wife and I are always on the lookout for onboarding another income stream. She has two businesses and I now have two businesses. We are now seeing opportunities as they show up in our lives.
The beauty of seeing what shows up vs looking is seeing fits your spiritual being way more than looking.
Photographing nature isn’t something I picked up when I retired. I’ve been enjoying natural places and photographing its beauty for over twelve years. In addition, it wasn’t my intention to sell my photography in this next journey of mine. I’ve tried in the past, but failed horribly. However, the failure helped me learn that there was more to my photography as an act. I was immersing myself in nature’s beauty, quieting my soul, and putting myself in a concentrated situation where the only thing I was doing at that moment was the photography itself. Meditation at its best doing something that truly nourished who I was. It helps me feel whole. I now want to share that with others.
There is more to life than just work, retire and our final day on this earth. This is a very simplified statement because I know life isn’t that simple. It’s hard, complicated, confusing, fun, exhilarating, short, unpredictable, and full of excuses roadblocking us from doing something we want and should be doing. However, take stock of what you are doing now because if it’s nourishing your very existence than it is what you’ll most likely be doing later in life. Like I said earlier, I’m not doing anything new, other than seeing the opportunities I have in front of me with the life skills/experiences I have honed over many years.
Planning to do what I am doing right now isn’t retirement like I’ve been told. We get caught up in this illusion we have to maintain everything our career has given us. But that’s the beauty, it has given you what you wanted and needed at that time. This mindset helped me realize I didn’t want to work in a job that was diametrically opposed to my spiritual being because I am promised something at the end. I knew it was time to move on and give myself the ultimate goal of living a life with the purpose of truly feeling whole again.
You have to ask how many times do I need to spend thousands of dollars twice a year for those big vacations to get away from the stresses of work and life. Isn’t that how vacations are perceived? If in my new adventure in life I feel like I need to get away than I am doing something wrong. I’m not experiencing my life, I’m repeating it. I may not get to travel the world and that is ok because it is not my intention to. I have an intention to live a consciously aware existence and let the process flow. In that flow I will entertain any and all opportunities as they come my way. I believe this makes life worthwhile.
Yes, we budget and plan.
We have retirement accounts, 529 plans for our two boys, a little money in savings and some personal capital to keep us afloat as we continue to develop our “retirements” trades. We are both about eight years away from age 60 where our retirement accounts could supplement our current adventures or what might morph from them. I say morph, because starting to sell my photography as my second business kind of just happened over the past few months. I’ve jumped at the opportunity to do it right this time with the help of a company that supplies support, tools and guidance for artists. So far worth every dollar invested.
Remember, with anything, you are going to have to put in the work. However, starting now with some planning and the right guidance helps it all fall into place. There will be ups and downs, but the worth you are creating hits all aspects of you life.
Prepare financially, but work and eat in such away that you maintain your health and well-being. Work to live, not live to work. Don’t sit around for thirty five years under the operational standard you’ll live when the pile of money is big enough. Live now by bringing awareness to your finances and all aspects of your life. This brings balance in your life and a feeling of wholeness.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.davidpagepursuit.com/shop-art, https://davidpage.substack.com/, https://www.trueselfpursuit.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/davidpagepursuit/, https://www.instagram.com/trueselfpursuit/
- Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/david-page-9632b5236
- Other: [email protected]