3. Story Behind the Photo: Letchworth Camping “The bigger picture.”- As you age, you see your life through a different lens. Around age 26 your prefrontal lobe starts to firm up the way a fresh egg firms up on a cast iron skillet. This is your brain on change. You start to understand the world from a bigger perspective and you’re able to see the world from more places than just from the bridge of your nose. My twenties was mostly a haze of me and my ego, what I wanted, and I how I thought I should feel. My thirties started to become a little more complex, a little less about me. Instead my thirties kept writing the story of the energy behind the matter we see everyday. In your twenties you see the house, you sit in the living room; you take both for face value. “I’m in a house, in a living room; it’s nice,” you would say. In your thirties you see a home, you see the love, you read into the deeper story of the people that occupy that space. That living room starts to become less about the stuff, the matter, and more about the energy. I got little glimpses at first, little vignettes about parts of life I disliked. When I was younger I thought boredom was to be avoided at all cost. I thought boredom was the absence of meaning because I only saw the exterior shell of the situation. In my thirties boredom became a special treat. I learned to embrace boredom when I had it. I also was able to realize gratitude in where I was, who I was with, and how the day unfolded. I learned to own gratitude. I started to see when I looked critically at my life that I should not look at the face value, but deeper below it. Here is a picture I took of my wife and our thirties at Letchworth State Park, overlooking the falls below. Our first camping trip of many, where boredom would be welcomed.