My camera broke.

My camera’s film advance lever broke recently in the middle of a trip to Thailand.

Tragically, the lever went the way of us and all things in the middle of a roll of film. Had the tired part given up on my first exposure, I could have shrugged it off — a roll lost, oh well. Had I made it to the final frame, I may have been able to salvage some of my earlier shots, given that they’d be somewhat shield from light when I opened the back cover to investigate.

No, in typical fashion, my luck ran out right at frame 7 of 15. I had invested so much energy and thought into the first 7 shots, gotten my hopes up about how they would turn out. The universe had other ideas, though. I took care to open the rear cover in near total darkness, and delicately hand-wound the remainder of the roll, but it’s unlikely anything can be recovered.

I’m getting used to this feeling that I’m halfway through a roll and my advance lever is jammed.

In recent months, I have been investing time here and there in a mental exercise. For just a few minutes at a time, I unplug and try to imagine my ideal life. I picture what kind of community I want to live in, what my career might look like, how I will engage with the people most important to me.

As this experiment evolved into a more regular habit, I came to realize some significant disparities between my ideal and actual lives.

That sentence may read like a dispirited resignation. In truth, being able to recognize the disparities has been an uplifting development for me. It’s not that I had some grand vision for what life I wanted to lead and I took a wrong turn or went off the tracks. On the contrary, I had the makings of a general plan for personal and professional actualization, and I have been more or less successful in realizing it.

For me, the disparity between ideal and actual arises from the process through which I developed self awareness, and the time it took to work through that process. The inputs that informed the roadmap for my current self — the values, relationships, and aspirations — were shallow. I spent a lot of my adult life to date thinking work was the point, and that promotions and raises, the rewards a person receives for commitment to the professional marathon, were meaningful.

By taking time to check-in about what my ideal life looks like, I have discovered some things about my deeper values.

For example, I know that happiness and fulfillment aren’t waiting for me in a professional title. My story is laughably trite — boy runs away from small town of his adolescence at the first opportunity and vows to make a name for himself. Almost 15 years later, I have what some would call a successful resume, but don’t feel much for it in the way of pride or satisfaction.

I know that Earth’s health matters to me. I’ve always been something of an environmentalist, but often thought that walking more and recycling plastics was enough. Now I find genuine satisfaction by making conscious decisions about my consumption, and often non-consumption, and by being in nature and spending time with the planet.

I know that deep, meaningful relationships are worth energy and investment. I lost a lot of promising friendships because I didn’t have access to this value. I was often eager to find a reason to give up on relationships and looked for an escape route before spending valuable time on a person. They all end anyway, I told myself. Why bother?

These are just a few values that I am trying to put into practice today. The tricky part about this project is that I’m halfway through a roll of film and my advance lever is jammed.

Whether or not my plan was well-informed, it got me to a relatively comfortable spot in life. I want to open the cover and tinker with the mechanics, but it’s not easy to sacrifice the 7 shots I’ve taken. And, hell, I don’t really know what’s going on in there anyway, so what if I kill the roll for nothing?

For now, I find a great deal of comfort in my developing self awareness. At the end of the day, I can turn off the screens, take out the earbuds, look inward, and assess how I engaged with that day’s experiences, how my engagement reflected my values, and how it got me any closer to my ideal life.

None of this fixes my broken camera, of course, but it’s a start.