Fixed Point

To stop, and keep looking at one thing. For me, there is no more comfortable time than that.

I’ve been meditating for about ten years now. Usually, I close my eyes and turn my attention to my natural breath and the sensations arising in my body. This is a little different. I stop in a place I find beautiful, add nothing, take nothing away, and simply keep looking.

The old town of Cannes. I set the camera at eye level in the alley in front of a crêperie. After a while, a woman carrying shopping bags walks up and greets a friend coming the other way, cheek to cheek. A word or two. They laugh and go their separate ways. And the frame is left with the same alley as before.

Watching, I find that a city resembles music. First there is a steady beat, kept by people’s footsteps. Birds cross it like a violin; the wind stirs the branches like a synthesizer. No one is conducting, yet everything is playing.

If I keep watching, at some point the line between me, watching, and the city being watched grows thin. The people walking past, the birds, the branches in the wind, and I, watching them: all of us are part of one large system. On this earth, in a system circling the sun, I too am just one of the sensations arising there. If ordinary meditation turns inward, perhaps this is a meditation that turns outward.

To be honest, without a camera I can’t really do this. If I stood still in a crowd, staring at something for a long time, people would surely think it strange. There is still a part of me that cares what others think. But with a camera in my hands, somehow I can stand there without hesitation. The camera is a tool for recording, and at the same time, my permit to stop.

So I keep watching the same place for a minute, sometimes more than twenty. At Porte de Versailles in Paris, under a cloudy sky, people hurried across the crossing while a tram stood quietly beyond them. On a train along the Côte d’Azur, I fixed the camera at the window seat and filmed the window, and myself looking out.

Every time someone enters the frame, I think: this person, and this one, each has a morning of their own and somewhere to go. If a hundred people pass through one frame, there are a hundred lives there. All I do is get to see a few seconds of them, from a little way off.

On this blog, I’ll quietly set down the places I’ve watched like this, and what I felt there. In a place where no one hurries you.

If you like, stop here with me for a little while.