Yesterday I wanted to try to do Peter Frasers experiment out doors, it was a sunny day but unfortunately very windy and not warm enough to sit somewhere for 30 minutes… So, I decided to cycle around in East London, not far from where I live, the whole morning already I had this “feeling” that I want to cruise around the streets between Mare Street and London Fields. For me this experiment was more about having the courage to follow the feelings that evolve and make the photos, rather than thinking “oh - this is too banal or it won’t work anyway..” I do have this thoughts quite often and I think it is the conceptual mind that is dominating over the feelings.
The other interesting thing I came across, was this paragraph of the Tibetan Dhammapada :
“Alas! Composites are impermanent,
They start to perish as they start to be.
Since having arisen they perish;
Calming them down is happiness.”
This paragraph of the Sutra is explaining the impermanent nature of our feelings & I thought it fits with this experiment. I indeed can not follow all my feelings and emotions, they come and go, some last only for a short while, some longer. But then there are this deeper feelings, which are more difficult to grasp and I think they often guide us to somewhere unexpected but eventually revealing…
[caption id=“attachment_524” align=“alignnone” width=“466” caption=“I met Gualtiero for a coffee before hand and we were discussing, that we are doing this MA because we like what we are doing and not because we want to be famous. My opinion is, as long as I can survive with this job I will be happy and content… etc. Shortly afterward I came across this and click - photo made.”]
[caption id=“attachment_525” align=“alignnone” width=“700” caption=“This photo is probably the reason why I wanted to go out. I'm feeling a bit gloomy at the moment, it is soon my late grand fathers birthday and somehow I'm missing him. "Going around the world with the index finger" is one of my fondest childhood memory and I loved when my grandfather was showing me the world. So, I was cruising around and I noticed the secondhand shop and what did I spot.. these globes! I asked the shop owner, I was allowed to make the photos and that made me very happy… “]
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I was snapping around for a bit longer but nothing convincing came up afterward. It was probably also because it was cold and I was distracted by the thought of wanting to go home. Which I did, I went to bed to warm myself and I thought - why not do the 30 minutes experiment once more? This is the result of it:
