CS 001

There’s a particular building with a particular smokestack that I have been watching every morning for years. I can see it from my bed, from my desk, from my couch. It’s unknowingly held my attention as I’ve watched its billows change shape and color. I don’t even realize it’s mesmerizing me as I open my eyes with the morning light and as I sip my tea while I slowly come to life. I’ve lived in New York for 6 years, in the same apartment. Same view. Same skyline. I must have witnessed the same angle a thousand times, and taken hundreds of pictures of it that, by all accounts, should be identical But somehow, they’re all different.

Why?

light - temperature - season - time - weather - wind

While our manufactured world changes slowly, or not at all, everything else is always shifting around us. Making everything new again, moment to moment.

Concrete doesn’t evolve. Everything else does. Constantly.

Infinite variation. Unrepeatable color.

Moment specific light.

Forms that only exist once.

Look away too long and the sky has already changed to another shade of pink you may never see again. The reflection of sunlight — the exact angle it hits a window on a building that hasn’t moved in years. The changing shapes made by smokestacks blowing in the winter wind. Even a defining symbol of concrete industrial life becomes about movement when it interacts with wind and light.

‍ ‍Whether we experience this constant renewal, of course, depends on our ability to notice it.

What do we see when we look out at the same view, from the same window, on another Monday?

Do we orient our attention on the fixed or the alive around it?

How does our experience of our environment – and the meaning we make from it – change when we start to recognize the

constant possibility of renewal around us?

This also opens into other questions I’ve been exploring around

movement, attention, and perception.