This picture is the prompt for the latest 100 Word Challenge over at Julia's Place. Now if I were one of those figures on that flimsy protruberance I would be worrying like heck that the architect had got his calculations right. And maybe that's why the picture made me think of death - or more particularly of an interview I heard yesterday with the guitarist Wilko Johnson who has been given ten months to live. The man sounded positively jubilant as he recounted how the imminence of his end has liberated him from the preoccupations that blinker us all.
Eyes trained on the chasm of the future tend to be blind to the Now. A tracery of branches, the smile of a child are eclipsed by mortgage angst and to-do lists.
But the dying man is clear-sighted. 'Every cold breeze against your cheek, every brick in the road makes you feel alive,' he says. 'There is this marvelous feeling of freedom. Why didn't I work out before that it's just the moment you're in that matters!'
And we, oppressed by wider horizons, should maybe tread more savouringly and not wait for death to teach us how to live.
