The Ghost of a Movement

When I was seven, my mother told me that if I moved my hand fast enough through the bathwater, I could catch the ripples before they reached the porcelain edge. I spent hours trying to trap the water, but the harder I reached, the more the surface turned into a frantic, shapeless blur. It was only when I stopped trying to hold the water and simply let my fingers trail through it that I saw the true shape of the motion. The world is rarely as solid as we pretend it is. We spend our lives trying to freeze moments into something we can name, something we can keep in a box, but the truth of a thing is usually found in the blur—in the space between where we were and where we are going. We are always leaving a ghost of ourselves behind in the air, a soft trail of where we have just been. What if we stopped trying to stand still?

Karthick Saravanan has captured this fleeting grace in his image titled A Creative Exercise with A Slow Shutter Speed. He reminds us that even the most rhythmic parts of our lives are constantly slipping through our fingers. Does this blur feel more like a memory or a dream to you?