Time is an Illusion

Bucharest, Romania, 9 May 2023

After twenty years of writing on photography (pondering questions of perception, that is), I've started to regularly take photos myself. Soon I discovered my fascination for, among quite some other things as the pics on this site demonstrate, trees and clouds (examples you will find here). When the other day I was going through photos I had taken many years ago I felt quite stunned that taking photographs of trees and clouds was quite obviously something that I had always done.

The same applies to my view of the world: It seems to have been the same all along. I realised that (albeit not for the first time) when I recently told one my brothers that only the present exists and that the past as well as the future were illusions (helpful ones, of course, for they allow us to organise our lives and help watchmakers to make money) since I can only experience the present, my brother let me know that I had always argued like that. In other words, what I thought to be a new discovery turned out to be a defining feature of my existence.

Bilbao, Spain, 25 April 2023

Throughout my life I have been interested in Zen (or what I thought to be Zen). We are perfect but do not know it, is one of the sayings I've tried to come to terms with. In the course of grappling with this issue I concluded that the surest way to go nuts is to load what happens to you with (supposed) meanings. So how could we possibly rid ourselves of this need for meaning?

By simply observing ourselves we realise that everything works the way it is meant to work. We walk and talk, look and hear without making much of a conscious effort. And then, one day, all this stops. Just like that. It is all very strange and too much for us to comprehend. And although it is part of our nature to try to make sense of whatever, I nowadays tend to believe it might be better to simply experience life as it presents itself. For as the Zen saying goes: If you understand, things are just as they are. If you do not understand, things are just as they are.