Box of Light is made possible thanks to these visionaries:
It's worth spending time on that edge between what we know and what we don't know is possible. It's a grey line that successful people tend to thrive in – pushing their limit and surpassing it time and again. The comfortable road is to stay in the realm of knowledge, but what would we become if we stood still? I recently came across this athlete quote that captures it perfectly:
"Your biggest challenge isn’t someone else. It’s the ache in your lungs and the burning in your legs and the voice inside you that yells, ‘can’t’, but you don’t listen. You just push harder and then you hear the voice whisper ‘can’. It is then that you discover that the person you thought you were is no match for the one you really are.”
We each own our future. I try to push everyday. And my limits aren't extreme. A 10-wave set on my head had my match during a mid-week surf at Aramoana last week (I thought my lungs were going to burst and I was sucking oxygen so hard I inhaled most of the froth in the impact zone). But it was worth it for the handful of waves I managed to claw into.
In my photography I have this voice inside my head challenging me at every composition and every edit, pushing, pushing and trying to bring my work to a new level. Sometimes I make ground, sometimes I fail. Even the camera in my hand pushes the boundaries. I can shoot in near darkness, swim around an inky black ocean and capture frames underwater of the post-sunset colours from nothing but a faintly glowing sky. That wasn't possible when I first started Box of Light six years ago.
Of course, no one lives in this space more than our elite athletes. We can learn a lot from them. Take Aussie surfer Owen Wright for example. He sat out the entire 2016 World Surf League Championship Tour season due to a career-threatening, traumatic brain injury he suffered on Oahu’s North Shore in Hawaii in 2015. The opening round for 2017, the Quiksilver Pro on the Gold Coast, marked his return to the Championship Tour after accepting the injury wildcard for 2017. Then, in what surely must be one of the great sporting moments of the decade, Owen pushed through to win the opening event. Incredible.
And then there is Mount Maunganui's Kehu Butler. He turns 17 next week, but two days ago he went out in solid Western Australian waves and won his first Pro Junior event – part of the Australasian Junior Qualifying Series.
He won the tough-fought 30-minute final in style, beating the masterful surfing of WA local and aerial expert Kael Walsh in the process. Kehu was chaired up the beach to a haka that brought the Trigg Point crowd to its feet. Legend!
See you at the beach ... Derek
PS We still have copies of our book Seasons available and plenty of Merino Country as well. You can get yours right here.
Box of Light is made possible thanks to these visionaries: