Ours is not an age that wounds loudly. It erodes gently in asking us not to imagine, but to endure. Not to reach, but to conform. Wonder turns to silence and the hunger to look beyond ourselves is dismissed as arrogance. We are handed survival in place of vision, reaction in place of reflection. The self becomes not a presence to dwell in, but a mask of convenience—tailored for legibility, tempered for tolerance.
And yet we speak of individuality. We celebrate it in language, as the triumph of modern liberties. Yet beneath the surface lies a crueler betrayal: the time in history that most loudly praises the self has also quietly forsaken it. We trade our contradictions for coherence. We dilute our questions to remain understood. In a culture where our every impulse is mirrored back to us—our musings, our fears, our desires—what companion is more permissive than the collective? Certainly more comforting than the starkness of an unguarded mind. Certainly kinder than the mirror that reflects not what we are, but all we’ve relinquished to belong.
There was a time when the inner life was not ornamental, but essential. When to live fully meant to be in dialogue with the depths of one’s mind. To feel, to roam, to revere all that remained beyond our understanding. To allow the ineffable to remain undisturbed. Strength was not in assertion, but in our capacity to witness.
But that understanding is vanishing.
The pace of modernity, frenetic and unrelenting, is intolerant of the contemplative. We are driven to disclose, to react, to remain legible. Withdrawal becomes suspect. Silence, nearly unforgivable. The gaze once turned inward now angles toward performance. The self, once a sanctuary, disintegrates, lost to the screens and simulations we herald as a shared culture. Each demands a version of us. None return us to ourselves. And in this slow estrangement from contemplative life, we abandon not only mystery, but reverence. Such a loss accrues quietly, in the mundanity we mistake for peace. In the hollowness that follows even our most elated joys. Devoid of interiority, we lie at the mercy of what “normality” dictates we become. Emotion flattens. Thought repeats itself. Imagination—the final corridor to the possible—recedes. We become strangers to our very humanity, detached from the deeper pulse that once guided every glance, every gesture.
In my own craft—in photography—I try to resist this severance not by chasing spectacle, but by lingering with what resists display. I do not take images. I keep vigil with them. The shadow folding across a dying bloom. The defiance of color in the wake of decay. These moments do not perform. They abide. They do not yearn in their vanity, but wait to be received. To photograph in this way is not to assert dominion, but to hear the melodies of life as all they are meant to become. It is to approach the visible not as proof, but as prayer. This is what we are abandoning: the discipline of interior perception. Of being formed not through exposure, but by fidelity to the undefined. The inner life is not indulgence. It is the origin from which conscience, longing, the very virtues of the human spirit emerge. One may exist without it, but will scarcely awaken to anything more.
There is a quieter tragedy in how we treat the act of knowing. Understanding no longer deepens mystery, it dissolves it. Interpretation becomes possession. Explanation, a preemptive defense. We reduce not to fathom, but to control. To evade what eludes articulation. And so the sacred becomes consumable. The poetic, a novelty. The soul, transcendent of the expressible, commodified. To live such a life is to walk in the ashes of one’s ideals, in the defilement of our purest imaginings. The mind, utilitarian. The heart, ornamental. And what cannot be spoken, shown, or sold is quietly surrendered. Identity, once an evolving inquiry, is burdened by conformity. Even the will to aspire is regarded with suspicion. Aspiration mistaken for vanity. Longing for discontent. But true aspiration is not a lack—it is a reverence for creation.
And here is the more devastating truth: not merely in what is lost, but in how willingly we relinquish it. We retreat from depth not out of fragility, but in fear of confronting ourselves unwitnessed. It is easier to perform than to remain. Simpler to mirror than to inhabit the solitude of ideals. But in shunning the silence, we enact a deeper betrayal: the refusal to meet the one voice that cannot be replicated, the mind unguarded, awake and alone. We inherit selves that are observed but unrooted. The price of perpetual display is not fatigue; it is exile from our own interiority. And yet, something in us remains unyielding. A hunger stirs, not for more, but for meaning. It flickers at the edge of awareness. It endures, despite the threat of desolation. To aspire is to resist completion. To deny arrival. To turn not toward image, but toward the glimmer of what still beckons. Not ambition in disguise, but devotion. A patience with what is still becoming.
Aspiration cannot thrive in economies of immediacy. It is gradual. Intimate. It asks for solitude, for intent, for the resilience to remain incomplete. It is the quiet tending of what blooms toward voice. A labor not of striving, but of surrender. This is the ethic behind my lens. I do not seek what announces itself. I remain with what trembles on the brink of form. A petal turned inward. Its beauty not in what it reveals, but in what it protects. There is no vanity in such seeing—only an eye that yearns for truth. And truth, I have come to learn, does not reveal for performance. It waits for the one who will not attempt to possess it. And in that waiting, I remember: neither I, nor the world is finished. Beneath each surface, something is still unfolding—if I am still enough to bear witness.
I would rather remain unresolved but awake—loyal to the call which beckons without end. Aspiration is not refusal. It is to remember that this is not all. And if I am to carry one vow, let it be this: That I will not forsake the voice that draws me inward. Nor silence what remains unformed within me. That I will not trade the weight of becoming for the ease of being seen. For I still long to meet what waits in silence to be lived. And I would rather follow that wandering path into the unnamed than let the world persuade me I have already arrived.
And perhaps that is the final miracle: That even in the unobserved, the spirit may rise. That in the stillness of becoming, a life may yet be shaped—not for arrival, but for the sanctity of meaning.
