At the South Pole, life winds down. Over time, you stop focusing on life here and begin to focus on the life you have planned outside. It’s a large isolation chamber. The people here don’t really change, their idiosyncrasies just become more emphatic and their true natures begin to show, for both better and worse. I spend my time in four ways, almost entirely exhaustive: The first is hanging out with folks, chatting, watching films, and drinking cocktails at the occasional evening get together. The second is studying Russian, which I try to do every evening before falling asleep. And then, I study finance to get my CFA, a couple hours a day when I’m on my best behavior. And finally, it’s running and a sauna daily. Beyond these habits, I’ve created a simple morning checklist to keep me grounded.

Drink water.

Any meetings/calls planned?

Need to study anything?

Any books you’d like to finish soon?

What is today’s workout plan? How are you feeling?

What do you hope to accomplish at work today? Is there anything you’ve forgotten about?

Anything you need to sign up for?

Anyone you need to respond to?

Any financial responsibilities?

Need to fix anything?

Need to clean or wash anything?

Any ongoing projects you’d like to make progress on?

Check currently open tabs, read an article.

Beyond these things, after a year the days are not days; they become just time. Hours tick by and the world does not change. Global events are white noise. The birth of a friend’s child is a scene in a movie, to be smiled at and appreciated for its intrinsic beauty. Money loses its value when there’s nothing to spend it on. It may be a bit blasé, but it’s life at the South Pole. Eight months of winter later and what has changed? The adventure is in the mind: focusing on how to cope with the personal challenges of internal motivation, personal development priorities, relationship maintenance, how you can make the lives of those around you more enjoyable or fulfilling. The environment is a given. I recently heard someone define success as how well you align your actions with your values. I appreciate heuristics like these. As Thoreau said, they “cut a broad swath and shave close.’ And when there is such a small decision space for you to move and think in, the smallest actions have the largest consequences. You don’t have the potential to change the wider world, the effects of your actions are confined to exactly 40 other people. In this, how do you redefine your values? As someone who lives in the future, who understands their worth as the potential to use one’s accumulated knowledge and skills to affect as many people as positively as possible, it’s necessary to recreate oneself in an image constructed by the small reflections provided by the everyday interactions of those whose occupy the most time and energy. Should this way of living be carried on when the potential to influence the greater world returns and the decision space becomes larger, infinite? What conclusions should be drawn? Is the realization that one should draw their value from everyday, personal interactions real insight or just a coping mechanism? 70 days and I’ll see exactly which conclusions carry weight when seen through the lens of the ‘real world.’

I’ve described the stark, forlorn qualities of Antarctica to a friend and they deemed it an “ideas graveyard.” An apt description for those who find inspiration in the vibrantly alive and vividly colorful world of life. However, here, rather than expiring, I think one’s ideas simply change. At the South Pole you are immersed in the future and the past. The first explorers, operating in an age fueled by the zeitgeist of colonialism and high-modernist human supremacy, made it here in a heroic struggle against nature (if blank, cold, mineral nothingness can be deemed nature). Personal, national, and scientific fame for those most daring and well-prepared. This legacy is everywhere you look. And walking two miles in -70f wind-chill makes this history visceral.

Yet the work performed now is oriented toward the future. Science is discovery, and the data might be collected now but it will be many months until anything profound will be gleaned from it. An effort so detached from the trillions of tiny particles searched for and measured so precisely as to seem unreal. Where does that leave the minds of those who inhabit this liminal space? A sense of waiting without knowing what for.

I’ve been tasked with capturing this for a filmmaker. Briefly trained in camera usage, shot composition, and basic light exposure, I’m meant to represent not the people of the South Pole but the spaces they inhabit, the passing of time, and the emotional detritus left by all of us who will only ever be a guest here. Empty hallways, silent wind whipping flags in snow, a room full of green life bereft of movement. Silhouettes and turned backs in still reflection out windows and at screens. Behemoth balloons floating out over the ice measuring the high atmosphere, only ever seen once. A comfortable stillness where people know their purpose and have no reason to rush. Here there is no competition, somehow, where space and resources are most restricted. There exists a rare sense of purpose and fulfillment, most forgetting at length their extreme separation from the world at large.

The film is titled Messengers, directed by Jeffery Zablotny, and it will premiere at the 2024 Canadian Film Festival. And who knows, maybe my Canadian permanent residency application will be approved by then too?