There are moments when the eye sees something, and the heart reacts before the mind has time to make sense of it. Today, standing beneath the towering presence of Big Ben in London, I lifted my camera just as a plane sliced through the sky behind it. It was an ordinary scene, and yet, for me, it was not. In that split second, my body reacted—tight chest, skipped heartbeat—a familiar wave rising from a memory carved deep into my being.
Years ago, I stood in New York and watched one of the most traumatic events in modern history unfold. The images from that day, the sounds, the smell of smoke in the air, they’ve never fully left. And though life moved on and time smoothed some of the edges, I learned that visual memory has a strange and powerful way of bringing the past right into the now.
But it didn’t linger. The moment passed. The plane kept going. The clock struck on. And I found myself again in the rhythm of London—a city that carries its own heavy history yet walks with its head held high. The streets pulse with stories. Every stone seems to speak. And even the trauma, when it surfaces, does not stay—it visits like a ghost, nods, and then recedes.
What do we do with images that stir us so deeply? Maybe we honor them by remembering. Maybe we accept that they’ll come, uninvited, now and then. And maybe they teach us to pause, to breathe, and to carry on.