John Pospisil

My daughter Grace asked her Kindergarten teacher whether sharks eat mermaids? I thought it was a reasonable question, given that sharks and mermaids often share the same habitat. Her teacher answered no, although Hannah, my younger daughter disagreed. She was sure that sharks do eat mermaids.. To settle the dispute, I did some research at the Institute of Mermaidian research.The answer is definitely no, sharks do not eat Mermaids, and the simple reason is that Mermaids, are much, much smarter than sharks, and will always out smart a shark. A mermaid has never been eaten by a shark for this reason.

Today a year ago, my eyes, for the first time in my life, were opened to the fact, that life is not eternal, and that eventually we all run out of tomorrows.It has become clear that the only thing that really matters in this life is how much love we leave behind – the amount of love we give minus the amount of love we receive.

All my old fears, frustrations, malaise, ingratitude, mislaid ambitions were cut, burnt, poisoned, and starved, not only from my brain, but I believe, also from my soul. Yes, change, is difficult, but I can never go back and be the man I was before July 31 2009, so that means the only way is forward, and to focus on what’s important, my family.

And what a wonderful year it has been, to see my beautiful daughters grow, and to see my amazing wife shine.

My partner in this exercise, Hannah Pospisil eating a banana we had just bought during our morning walk in Lima 

When the Pospisils were in Lima in November and December I would often take Hannah for a walk early in the morning. Going for a walk in Lima is an entirely different experience to talking a walk in say Sydney.

In the areas where we walked, around San Miguel, I never felt threatened by a person in any way. However, I can’t say the say the same about the traffic – which really is the biggest danger.

That aside, one idea that intrigues me is the idea of “the ordinary”, or more precisely, the idea of actually looking at ordinary things rather than letting them slip into the background.

With this in mind I set out one morning with Hannah to take pictures of things that we saw on our way – both the ordinary and the odd. The only thing that ties these images together is that Hannah and I saw all of them on the morning of November 29, 2008.