The Geometry of Waiting

I was standing on the corner of 4th and Main, waiting for a bus that was already twenty minutes late. Beside me, an elderly woman in a yellow raincoat was staring intently at the red signal across the street. She didn’t seem bothered by the delay or the drizzle. She told me she liked the red lights best because they were the only time the city actually stopped to breathe. She said that when everything is sharp and clear, you feel the pressure to move, to produce, to be somewhere else. But when the world blurs into soft, glowing circles, you are finally allowed to just exist in the pause. It was a strange thought, that our frantic urban pace relies entirely on these rhythmic, glowing interruptions to keep us from spinning off the axis. We spend so much of our lives trying to see things clearly, but perhaps the most honest view is the one where the edges soften and the noise turns into light. What do you see when you stop trying to focus?

Siew Bee Lim has captured this exact feeling of quiet suspension in the image titled Bokeh of Traffic Lights. It turns the rush of a city junction into something gentle and still. Does this view change how you feel about your own daily commute?