A Balancing Act

I’m fairly certain I’m not alone in the fact that I am constantly attempting to balance what I enjoy doing, with what I am more or less forced to do. Just being a human is expensive. Paying for rent, fuel, utilities, food, etc. isn’t cheap, not to mention trying to be responsible by having health insurance, investing money for my future, and looking into purchasing a house. Life isn’t cheap. So naturally I’m forced to be working in a job that pays my bills.

I’m lucky enough to have a job that I thoroughly enjoy. Every job likely has negatives and mine is no exception, but despite the downsides I enjoy being around the people I work with, and using my creativity in order to tell stories that help people. Not everyone can say they get up in the morning happy about the job they will be going to that day, and I do not take that for granted in any way. However…

While I love my work, and love having creative freedom in that work, there’s a part of me that isn’t totally fulfilled by it. This lack of fulfillment seems to be addressed in the other things I do with my time. Some people would call them a hobby, some may consider it a side hustle. I think of it as more of the life I’m striving to build for myself. Making a conscious effort to build a life of freedom for myself. Freedom to create exactly what I am inspired to create rather than being given an assignment. Freedom to not be tied to a single location.

This is where the balancing comes in. Trying to balance making YouTube videos and taking landscape photos with the meetings, events, and assignments for work is no easy task. Consistency on YouTube is not easy in and of itself, but to try to maintain that while also fulfilling all my duties at work makes it even more stressful.

I’m not sure there’s any good way to balance the two without working yourself into burnout. Obviously, there are a few tricks and strategies involved in making it a bit easier. For instance, I often plan out what videos I will make each month at the beginning of the month. That way if I have an especially busy week at work I can prepare for that by record and editing my video for that week ahead of time. But sometimes that’s not even enough, because after long hours at work sometimes the last thing I want to do is put on a presentable face and point a camera at myself.

I really don’t have an answer… I don’t know what to do. An obvious way to get rid of this strife is by quitting my job and focusing solely on YouTube. But I’m nowhere near being able to make that financially feasible, so the job stays. I just have to be conscious of my time and what I spend my hours working on, and likely have to accept the fact that I have to work day and night, weekdays and weekends, for months - and maybe years - to be able to balance these things successfully.

Thumbnail photo: Matt Van Swol (2017)

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Photo Walk - Gjirokastër, Albania

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I went on another photo walk, as I have the habit of doing when visiting a city in Albania. It’s not only a way for me to practice one of my hobbies, but it also provides content for me to create a video for my YouTube channel.

In Gjirokastër, I spent basically the entire walk wandering around the bazaar area. It’s the main attraction of the town and most tourists only see this part of it. So much so, in fact, that sometimes I forget that there’s much more to the city further down the hill. In any case, I elected to go with a particular color this time which was yellow (in case you couldn’t tell from the photos below…).

I really pushed out of my comfort zone on this one. First, asking the owner of the restaurant I ate dinner at if I could take her photo. I just had to because the yellow shirt she was wearing just fit too perfectly into the entire project that I was doing. The fourth photo has a fun story behind it as well, that you can see if you watch the video, but simply put a guy saw me taking photos and when I explained in broken Albanian I was taking photos of things with yellow in them he led me into the upstairs of his shop. His son came running in to translate for us, and it was really just a lovely experience.

As I mentioned, if you want to see the interaction with the shopkeeper and his son, or if you want to watch me wander around struggling to find decent frames that had yellow in them, the video is linked below.

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Selcka Waterfall - Experience Gjirokastra

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About every 6 months I travel to the southern Albanian town of Gjirokastër. The NGO I work for operates a soup kitchen and after school program for some children there and I go in order to update the photos we have in our archive. For the last three or four times I’ve made the drive, I have tried to connect with a friend of mine. He runs a tourism agency called Experience Gjirokastra that explores the area surrounding Gjirokastër, Përmet, and Tepelenë. Because of weather, other responsibilities, or even just lack of time, we were unable to go out exploring. We had met a couple of times to have a coffee and chat, but never left the main bazaar area of the city. That is, until a few weeks ago…

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Photo Walk - Sarandë, Albania

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I’ve started doing photo walks in cities that I go to. It helps me practice my photography - often with some restrictions in place - but it also gives me content to film a video. The best part of doing the photo walks, however, is how it helps me explore and connect to a place.

This time, I was in the seaside town of Sarandë in southern Albania. Because it’s a beach town, I really wanted to capture the vibe that the town gives off. I made a conscious effort to snap photos that give the same relaxed, warm, summery feel that Sarandë has in early June.

As with every photo walk I’ve done until now, I gave myself some parameters. First, was the same as the last photo walk I did in Tirana: I could only press the shutter five times. Five photos, that’s it. No burst mode, no snapping to my hearts content until I got the angle I liked. Secondly, I chose to shoot all of these photos on my phone, which currently is the iPhone 13 Pro. Having three lenses really helps with this restriction, but it still presented it’s own challenges.

In any case, below are the five photos that I took, two of which I’m not very enthusiastic about, and two of which I really like. I’ll let you guess which one is in between those two feelings…

If you want to watch me struggle to figure out what to take photos of… the video is here:

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Hotel Nertili

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I’ve been trying to use my platform and craft to help promote tourism in Albania, and featuring places to stay around the country seemed like it fit perfectly with that goal. After dozens of messages to hotels and guesthouses around Albania, I finally got a positive response; Hotel Nertili.

Hotel Nertili is a family owned hotel, restaurant, and bar in Sarande, Albania. It was originally built in 2001, but has some ongoing renovations that began in 2020. The management of the hotel kindly offered me a three night stay to experience the hotel and to show it to the world in my own unique way. 

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The Road Less Traveled

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Because of where Pogradec is situated, to get to the southern parts of Albania there are two options. You can go north, to Elbasan then across the center of the country (where there aren’t any mountains) and then down a relatively new highway to the south. According to Google, it would take about four and a half hours. The second option is to go south along SH75, a windy, pot-hole filled road that is typically about one and a half lanes wide. It skirts the border of Greece, while passing by village after village and through the mountains in the south. It typically takes closer to five hours, if not more. If you know me, you know which road I take.

Driving this route had me thinking about an article I published a few weeks ago about why, if you’re visiting Albania, you should get outside of Tirana. More broadly, though, the kind of traveling I’ve fallen in love with. Granted, it would be a much easier, simpler, and smoother drive to go the northern route. It’s the route that almost everyone takes to get to Gjirokaster, and has some nice views along the way. It’s also the route that has exactly what you would expect along the way. That’s not me. Why take the highway when a more exciting route exists? Not only that, a route that you’re not quite sure what the next turn will bring. One that the majority of people in Albania have never been on, nor ever want to try. That sounds like a real adventure.

As I think about these two routes in terms of my life as a whole, it’s a fitting example. Although some day to day things can get monotonous, I like to think that my life is far from ordinary. When I think about the fact that my monotony is happening in this tiny country on the Adriatic Sea, I wouldn’t change it for the world. Little decisions throughout my life and my travels - like taking the road that other people wouldn’t want to just to see what’s along that journey - has shaped and changed my entire existence.

After all, didn’t Robert Frost say “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.” If I could go back to my 16 year old self sitting in American Literature class and show him this practical example of these poetic words, I would have immediately understood.  

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It Only Takes One

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I heard a quote one time that went something like this:

“One person can change the whole world for the better, as long as they don't give a damn who gets the credit.”

-Unknown

As you can see, I don’t know who said it. I don’t remember where I heard the quote, and throughout the research I did I was unable to find who originally said it. In either case, I think it rings true, but not quite in the same ways I used to think.

When I first heard the quote my first thinking was changing the entire world, as in every single person, place, and thing. But if you think at a much smaller scale, the impact of this idea can become so much greater. If you think in terms of how a country could change, or even a community. Not only that, the quote says “change the whole world for the better.” Better is relative. It doesn’t say save the world, or even just change the world. Those three little words at the end of that sentence make a huge difference. Changing something for the better doesn’t mean every aspect of it has been flipped, just that it is headed in the right direction.

When I started making YouTube videos in Albania I had one distinct goal: To change the world’s perception of Albania. The hope was that by showing what the people, culture, and landscapes were actually like, we could move away from the stigma of Albania that was created through the help of films like Taken. I thought that I would get famous by being the guy who is showing the world Albania. As it turns out, I gained a bit of fame and a was noticed for a short time, but it quickly faded when the next foreigner with a bigger following than me decided to come through the country. As first I would get a bit annoyed thinking, “I have been putting in the time in this country, why does that person get the recognition that I deserve.” And then, the quote came back to my mind; “…as long as they don’t give a damn who gets the credit.” I thought about my goal for my videos from when I started, and realized that my goal could be accomplished even if it wasn’t me being the face of it. I have no way of proving this, but there’s a good chance that my videos spurred someone to come visit Albania, which inspired someone else, which moved another foreigner, each of them with bigger influences than the last. Slowly, my goal is being accomplished, and I will likely never be thought of in it. I have helped to change this tiny world, now I need to stop giving a damn who gets the credit.

So now, in a similar vein, we come to my friend Sam, who also happens to be my supervisor at the nonprofit I work for. Sam has been devising a new permaculture project on a small plot of land nearby our campus. Agriculture is a big part of the Albanian livelihood and Sam hopes to figure out a way that the farmers around the country can shift from their monoculture farming to more of a polyculture practice. He has been doing small experiments with the plot he’s working on, in order to find the best methods for this climate and environment. His goal is not to be known as a revolutionary farmer in Albania, but rather to help make a small change in agriculture in this region that could vastly impact the entire world of the farmers that live here.

Even if only a dozen people have their perceptions of Albania changed through my videos, or the stories of people that I’ve inspired to come here, this country’s world has been changed for the better. Even if only two or three farmers see Sam’s practices, decide to give it a shot on their own farms, and realize how fruitful it can be, that is changing the world of those two or three farmers - and potentially their descendants for generations - for the better.

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Photo Walk - Tirana, Albania

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A few weeks ago, I had a few hours in Tirana before my flight to Germany. So I decided to try to spend some time practicing one of my favorite hobbies; photography. Because I had to be in the city anyways, I elected to go on a photo walk and see what sort of images I would be able to capture.

I decided to challenge myself. In more ways than one…

First of all, my go-to way to take photos is to just wander around and snap as many frames as I possibly can and find the good ones later. So the first way challenge was to only allow myself 5 frames. I did not use a burst mode, or try multiple angles of the subject, I found the frame I wanted, and waited for the right timing.

The second challenge, was confining myself to a determined space. In the center of Tirana you have Skanderbeg Square. A large open area, mostly for pedestrians, that many people will pass through on their way to and from work. I set the square as my boundary, and forced myself to find the five photos in the confines of the general vicinity of the square.

And if you’re interested in watching me try to pick out the frames I wanted, the video is below.