Between Here and There

I remember sitting on a train pulling out of a station in Rajasthan, watching the platform blur into a smear of ochre and grey. Across the aisle, a young boy pressed his forehead against the glass, his breath fogging the pane as he traced patterns in the condensation. He wasn’t looking at the landscape; he was looking for something he’d left behind, or perhaps something he hoped to find at the next stop. We spend so much of our lives in transit, suspended in that strange, quiet space between where we started and where we are going. It is a liminal state where the urgency of the destination fades, and for a few miles, we are untethered from our responsibilities. We are just observers, watching the world unfold through a frame, waiting to see what the next turn in the road might reveal. Do you ever feel most like yourself when you are moving toward somewhere else?

Ankush Kochhar has captured this exact feeling of transit in his beautiful image titled The Window Seat. It reminds me that even in the middle of a long journey, there is always a moment of quiet wonder to be found. Does this scene remind you of a journey you once took?