For the past eleven years, every day has been a Sunday for me. I have simply been thinking — about life in general, about photography, and about time. Sitting here in my “Mondrian’s Nest,” gazing at the great apple mango tree that has grown from a mere one-foot twig into a giant fifteen meters tall, I realize this tree has watched all that time go by. The tree says nothing. It needs a pruning now and then, like a haircut, yet every year it offers up the sweetest apple mangoes and simply does what it is meant to do.

And what am I meant to do? It is a grand question. What is my purpose? Why do I exist?

These are the same damn questions that every philosopher and sage has tried, in his own way, to answer. The Buddha summed it up: we are born, we suffer, and we die! Simple.

Since we have all been born, we must surely be somewhere in the suffering stage. What is your problem? Everything is a problem. Everything is a contradiction. All we can do is keep living until the point where every problem resolves itself — death! We just keep suffering, struggling to get through it all. Only a precious few among us ever come to understand the beauty of this thing called life.

Elon Musk has just become the world’s first trillionaire. On the other side, the socialists bark and howl that it is wrong for any one man to be so rich. Why not? I would ask. He, too, was a fetus once, just like everyone else. He started at the very same line you did. He simply ran faster.

In the seventh grade in Newton, Massachusetts, I was the fastest runner. Then I moved to Los Angeles and went to school there. In gym class, because I thought I was so fast, it never once crossed my mind that I might lose a hundred-yard dash. But a Black kid several inches shorter than me shot past me right from the start. It was an “Aha!” moment. Apply that “Aha!” to Elon Musk.

In life, shitty things happen whether you want them to or not. As Joseph Campbell said, you must follow your own bliss. If you want it, that is how you become one of the Elon Musks of this world. It is the same answer all the philosophers and sages came to realize and tried to pass on: “Know thyself.” If you have truly grasped that, then the richest man in the world is not Elon Musk — it is you.

One thing I have come to understand through photography is about time. The camera replicates what you see — but are you really seeing? It takes only a fraction of a second for the camera to copy what you saw. What do you see in that fleeting instant?

It takes a long time to know exactly what you saw. To gain the wisdom of knowing yourself, learn from those who came before you, or from those you admire now. It can be anyone.

Time resolves everything. Sublimate your suffering into the joie de vivre.