July 2026 — Tbilisi

I arrived in Tbilisi with a plan to work and left having mostly listened. The city does that. It is built on a slope, so every walk is a decision, and every decision ends somewhere with a view you did not expect.

What I kept noticing

Balconies. Not the clean ones — the wooden ones that sag, painted eight times over, held up by whatever was to hand. Half of them are falling down and all of them are still in use. Someone is always on them: drying clothes, smoking, arguing gently with someone inside.

It struck me that this is what I keep photographing everywhere I go. Not the landmark, but the thing that shows a place is still being lived in.

The thinking

Two conversations this month circled the same idea from opposite directions. Jennifer built a wall of paycheques so she could eventually leave and draw comics full time. Haz turned down every chance to scale so the thing he built would stay deep instead of getting wide.

Both of them made the same trade, really: they chose the version of the work that stays worth doing. I have been thinking about that a lot — that the point is not to accumulate options, but to keep the ones you already have worth choosing.

The light here stays until nearly ten. It makes you slower in a way that feels like a decision rather than a failure.