An Eye to the Street

This is not an instruction manual. It's not even a recommendation. To be mindful, for me, is very individualistic. I found a kind of mindfulness without looking for it. I found it in darker times.

I have always been a walker. I learned it from my mother; a keen wanderer who is still wandering, near eighty years now, and will continue to do so until she no longer can. To walk without a plan of the destination is my first thought when I visit somewhere. I fall in with the drift of a city or town. I listen to my body and let it take me where it may. An inner compass is activated.

Is this a form of meditation? Perhaps. It depends on the intention but maybe it doesn't. I don't know. If it helps to transmute something that may be ferreting away in the mind, then it is useful. But some people just hate walking and some hate meditation and that is okay.

Edinburgh is a city of many faces and sights. People come here every year and they walk around looking at things. They lose themselves in the old town, tramping the layered winding streets, looking, pointing, snapping photo's. This year the city is different. No festival madness. No theatre shows. This year I am different too.

I taught myself the rudiments of photography, starting in January. I read furiously. I consumed images from all over. I wanted to learn a new craft. I had an urge to do it. It consumed me. I thought about what I wanted to shoot and I ventured out into the streets. There was an intention here. I wanted to capture something of the place I had inhabited for almost three years, to record time in some way, to reflect.

I had known loneliness in this city, deeper than anything I had experienced before. A string of romances had failed badly, the last one seeing me travel over the sea to France to be met with yet another dead end. I returned utterly heartsick and defeated. I believed that companionship was beyond me now, a sailed ship. I completely crumbled emotionally. I was not well and was forced to try and rebuild from the inside.

And so. I walked. I wandered out with my little camera swinging from my hand. I wanted to get lost in the streets because I was lost, inside. I thought that some kind of cosmic cancelling out might occur. There is no logic to this, I know, but we do what we do.

I found comfort in drifting through the medley of faces and spaces, just looking, wandering. I was trying to absorb what was happening outside of me as a way of penetrating that other place, the one I carried around, the floating, personal void. Looking. Rediscovering the city I thought I knew. My eye slowly began to awaken. Looking. Moving on. Framing snatches of life. There was sadness. There was stagnation but there was always life.

Time passed. My camera remained with me as I walked. Every free day or evening I would find my self out somewhere, taking pictures. The camera was my personal memory box. A machine I could use to construct a curated reality through images. Perhaps this was all an act of avoidance. I was running away from myself. But who can measure what is happening when we choose to do something? We enter into it and it either seduces us or it doesn't. I was fully immersed. My mind was slowly beginning to quieten each time I walked, each time I looked. I was forgetting my heartache.

I remember standing on a corner off the Royal mile one afternoon. People were streaming past and I suddenly became aware that the light was perfect, utterly beautiful, and I realised then that I could see the light. That I was beginning to notice how it shaped the world. It was so simple. I breathed in deeply and felt a sensation of coming back into myself, slowly re-animating something I had not felt for a long time. Once I saw the light in this way I could not un-see it. I walked on, smiling, saying thanks. That was a real gift.

There was shadow too. I was full of shadows. I am so full of shadows. But I was starting to be okay with this. By observing the world I was staring to gain some understanding of my inner turmoil, of the places I concealed from myself. In meditation they talk of awareness. I suppose, in my own way, I was becoming aware. I kept walking. I kept taking pictures. I kept looking at the light. I'm not saying anyone else should try this. As stated its not an instruction manual. I cannot know what it means for another person to be mindful. We all have our own ways.

It is tempting to try and sum up what I am attempting to communicate, try and project what is a individual experience and tack it onto the 'We'. But I won't do that. What I will say is that it is worth doing things. Anything. Especially if you find yourself in a place that is darker than the one you may have envisioned. I will always harbour a loneliness, particular to me, whether I have a companion or not, whether I am in love or not in love. I will carry this loneliness, tend to it like one would a friend. My way was to walk and take pictures. My way was to look at things. Really look at them.

I believe, like my mother, I will keep walking until one day I cannot walk anymore. And I believe I will have my camera with me, freezing moments as I pass through them. Doing things like this has helped. It is still helping and, in my own way, I am mindful of that.