Chasing Light, Escaping Screens
I’ve just had a week off work. Not the kind where you mutter something about “downtime” while secretly nursing your laptop like an injured pet. No, this was proper time away — stepping outside, leaving the glow of the screen behind, and remembering that life is not best lived hunched over a keyboard, but somewhere out there, in the wind and sun.
It took about forty-eight hours for me to notice how much the computer has been killing me. Not dramatically, of course — there’s no melodramatic “death by spreadsheet” headline in my future — but quietly, stealthily: sitting in front of a computer for most of your waking life is not, in fact, the route to vitality and joy. It’s the route to a posture that resembles a question mark and eyes that look permanently startled. As soon as I stepped outside, I felt it. That buzz of being alive again. Muscles working. Lungs filling properly. Thoughts loosening their grip from the artificial urgency of emails and deadlines.
The revelation arrived with a nudge from Krystle Wright. I stumbled across her National Geographic documentary on Disney+, and within minutes, I was halfway to throwing my keyboard into the nearest canal. Wright’s world is one of extremes: clinging to cliffs, dangling from helicopters, chasing the image and encapsulating the memory. Her images are not merely photographs — they are important snapshots, frozen in a time and place that many of us can only dream of. They remind you that the world is staggeringly big, untidy, unpredictable, and that’s exactly why it’s beautiful.
Her images are breathtaking, of course, but what struck me wasn’t just the drama. It was the spark. The way her work makes you feel like the world is alive, untamed, and waiting for you to come and at least try to meet it halfway.
Now, let’s be honest: I am not a photographer – just someone who enjoys taking photographs and yes, there is a distinction. My camera roll is more “wonky horizon” than “majestic cliff.” If she’s producing symphonies in light and shadow, I’m closer to a man whistling off key in the shower. But here’s the thing: it doesn’t matter. What her work sparked in me wasn’t envy, but appetite. A hunger for more light, more air, more life lived outside the inbox.
Michael Palin once said of his travels that the joy wasn’t in the distant destination, but in the small, ordinary encounters along the way. I think that’s the note I’m striking here. I don’t need to dangle from a paraglider in the Andes to feel alive (although if offered, I would consider it). What I do need is more adventures, a return to where I once was and what I once did almost without thinking.
And here’s the knot I’m wrestling with: I need to earn my way in the world, like anyone. The bills do not politely disappear because I fancy an existential rethink. But the balance is wrong. The screen has crept too far into my days. My body knows it. My mind knows it. My heart shouts it every time I catch the golden flare of evening sun on the horizon and think, “I nearly missed this again.”
So perhaps this week was more than just time off. Perhaps it was a reset button. Krystle Wright may inspire people to climb cliffs, she has for me, but her work has sparked the more modest, but no less radical, idea that I need to reclaim more hours outside. To swap the glow of pixels for the glow of sky. To remember that even small adventures — a walk, a camera, an hour under trees instead of fluorescent lights — add up to a bigger, braver way of living.
So perhaps that’s the real legacy of Krystle Wright’s work for me. Not to emulate her extremes, but to embrace her spirit. To be reminded that we are not here just to “get through” our days. We are here to chase the light, however clumsily, and to find ourselves — not in pixels, but in places.
And if my photos never grace the cover of National Geographic, well… at least they’ll remind me of something far better: that I was there, outside, living.
Go and check Krystle’s work out for yourself, see if her images resonate in you the way they have with me
https://www.krystlewright.com/overview