Recently, I’ve been spending slow coffee mornings at Pret, sitting by the floor‑to‑ceiling glass window with a flat white or latte in hand. Most of my time there slips away in writing and reading, punctuated now and then by moments of idle gazing—watching the world drift past the window.
Then there was another ordinary morning—so ordinary it almost escaped notice—the sunlight came streaming through the glass in slender, golden shafts. They fell across my table, catching the rising steam from my cup. Such a simple, fleeting thing—and yet something about it felt extraordinary, almost poetic.
That was it. No grand epiphany. No orchestral swell. Just a ribbon of light, and a sudden awareness that I had ‘seen’ it—truly seen it—not merely with my eyes but with some part of the subconsciousness that rarely awakens. That tiny flicker of life was and vanished all in one breath. Just as all things do.
Maybe that’s the whole secret. We’re always searching for something real, something that endures. But perhaps it doesn’t take a story worthy of an ancient Greek tragedy to remind us how fragile beauty really is. We wait for life to come in fanfare, when meaning often arrives softly: sunlight caressing a coffee cup; the conversations of strangers at nearby tables weaving their own stories; the stirring of our mind for some inspiration. Each moment appears, glints, vanishes – the triptych of our being.
We don’t have to stand, like the man in the green overcoat in Casper David Friedric’s famous painting The Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, gazing heroically at the horizon to have a brush with the sublime. Sometimes, it’s hidden inside the most mundane jiffies of our lives—tucked so gently into our days that we overlook them.
When I paused long enough to notice that light, something inside me paused too—or perhaps, stepped briefly into a state unbound by time. For that instant, I glimpsed what the Buddha called śūnyatā —emptiness not as absence, but as the infinite space from which all things arise and to which they return. It’s the Truth he awakened to beneath the Bodhi tree two and a half millennia ago.
Outside the window, the world then became a moving poem: blurred reflections, people passing through the sunlight, each heading into their own horizons. None stayed long enough to be part of mine, and that, I realized, was a quiet comfort. Everything, like the light, moves on.
Maybe life is just that—a sequence of shimmering moments, each one vanishing even as we notice it. And yet, when we do notice, the ordinary becomes luminous. The mundane glows. Existence itself turns into poetry—fragile, radiant, ephemeral.
So now, each morning, I still sit by that window. The coffee tastes the same. The world still hurries past. The only difference is that sometimes, I look up from my screen and see how the light touches the steam, how time folds itself into an ordinary hour. And in that instant, I remember:
The purpose of life is not to chase the permanent, but to experience the efflorescence —while it happens, in ribbons of gold, before it slips quietly into memory.
And then even memory thins to air.
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