When you observe this landscape, what does it emerge in you? Does it give you a sense of beauty, littleness, peace, grandeur, pride? What do the surrounding objects awaken in you? When you raise your eyes up, does the firmament make you feel hope-filled? Hopeless? Loved? Does the silence, the infinity, the depth of the firmament frighten you? Does the space swallow you up as if you were nothing? Does the bridge tell you anything about life? When you look into the deep, does it conduct you anywhere? Where is the water canal going? Can it be a metaphor for where all of us are heading to in life? How do all the things in the landscape get to be?

I know one thing about this landscape— it cannot leave you indifferent. Don’t let your temperament gets in the way. What you should not miss or what you should reflect on is how these things (the water, the sky, the trees…) were created and how there are coalesced to have you think like that. Lose yourself in this so you can transcend the transcendent.

However, if it happens that you are left with a cold in your heart after reflecting on this, don’t make a drama out of it. Pascal saw it coming when he says in Pensees, “For after all what is man in nature? He is a nothing in relation to infinity, all in relation to nothing, a central point between nothing and all and infinitely far from understanding either. The ends of things and their beginnings are impregnably concealed from him in an impenetrable secret. He is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness out of which he was drawn and the infinite in which he is engulfed”. Things are tough; we are surrounded by all kind of distractions hampering us from seeing the blissful quietude craving to be poured on us. Now you know it is awaiting you whenever you call upon it. That is a step in the right direction, wouldn’t you say? Don’t stop looking because once you find it, you lose all your miseries.