The Edge of Remembering

We spend our lives building a house of facts. We name the trees, we map the roads, we hold onto the dates of things that happened. Then, slowly, the walls begin to thin. The edges of the world lose their sharpness. It is not a tragedy, though we often call it one. It is a returning. The sharp lines of the present soften into the grey of a winter morning, where the sky and the snow become one thing. We stop reaching for the names of things and start feeling their weight instead. There is a quiet dignity in this fading. To lose the map is not to be lost; it is to finally stop measuring the distance and simply exist within the space. What remains when the details have all drifted away like smoke in a cold wind?

Nirupam Roy has captured this stillness in the image titled Blurred Retrospect. It is a reminder that some things are felt more clearly when they are no longer in focus. Does the blur make the truth easier to hold?