The future


I love this shot I captured the other day with my "camera phone" (Brooklyn 99, Greg Holt). When we were preparing to leave Graz with our baby boy who was just a few months old, I read this article about how you should move to Sweden if you want to move to the future. (I did a quick Google search right now and did not come up with the same article). This picture basically embodies the "Dreaded" version of the future in my mind; the one where colors have ceased to exist because the soil is no longer fertile, and the concrete jungle looms over everything. And yet I find the lines and the light exquisite and not at all dreadful.

The light on this particular day was what made me look up and see the birds perched by the window. I had never noticed this building before. We have now lived in Gothenburg for one year and some weeks, and I've walked by the building in that picture probably hundreds of times on my way to buy baby diapers and formula. Never stopping to look up and see a building, think about the architect who designed it, the contractors who built it, or the year in which it was built - and what was happening in Sweden, Europe, and the world in said year. Yet the building stood there and stands there, with or without my knowledge of its presence.

Light by itself is magnificent. The way it changes based on particles in the air or times of day that affect the juxtaposition of the sun and the earth. That pure reflection of light in the windows seems fathomless, perfect, timeless. Just as as easily though, that view could have been obstructed like it is in the window on the left whose view of the sky and its light is blocked by a building across the way.
This was not supposed to be an essay on ethics, philosophy, religion, or self awareness. Sometimes it is nice to let things be what they are and progress as they may, without trying too much to tame them or alter their course.

So I am going to keep watching for the moments when the window panes catch the light of the sky on a perfectly cloudy day, and try to keep the obstructions at a minimum.

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