Life is more poignant than we know

"Whether you like this moment or not is not the point: in fact liking it or not liking it, being willing or unwilling to accept it, depending on whether or not you like it, is to sit on the fence of your life, waiting to decide whether or not to live, and so never actually living. I find it impressive how thoroughly normal it is to be so tentative about the time of our lives, or so asleep within it, that we miss it entirely. Most of us don't know what it actualy feels like to be alive. We know about our problems, our desires, our goals and accomplishments, but we don't know much about our lives. It generally takes a huge event, the equivalent of a birth or death, to wake up our sense of living this moment we are given - this moment that is just for the time being, because it passes even as it arrives. Meditation is feeling the feeling of being alive for the time being. Life is more poignant that we know."

From a recent piece in the New York Times by Zen teacher and poet Norman Fischer.

The other day I walked eastwards along the Thames Path from London Bridge. It had been a long time since I'd been for a walk with my camera and I'd almost never walked eastwards from London Bridge, so everything was newish and oddish and caught my eye - corners, reflections, perspectives, fast-changing light on a day of patchy cloud. The path dodges behind river-front apartments and back to the waterside. The architecture, new and converted from former warehouses, varies wildly - neither buildings nor path quite gel yet, but they're trying, they will. Sometimes, bizarrely, you find yourself walking in a tunnel between building-site hoardings pasted with photographs depicting a glossy, peopled riverside-as-it-will-be-when-we've-finished. In my head at the end of the day, not so much a flowing path beside the flowing river as a slideshow of views, of moments. Click. Oh. This. And this.