“The bird wishes it were a cloud. The cloud wishes it were a bird.”Rabindranath Tagore · Păsări răzlețe · 1916 · 35
The brighter the light, the shorter it lasts — yet what you saw stays yours.
Lightning does not shine like the sun, gradually and lastingly, but in a single discharge that reveals the whole sky and dies at once. So work certain truths about us: a sudden intuition, a moment of clarity in a crisis, a beauty glimpsed from a train. The mechanism is the contrast between intensity and duration: the stronger the light, the shorter it lasts. Its value does not vanish with it, for after the flash you know what the sky looks like, even if you remain in the dark.
Passage 1. Tagore tells us what the flash does. The next question is what stays in us after it. The answer: an orientation. You don't keep the light, but you keep the direction it pointed to. It's like glimpsing a lake from a train. You don't see it again, yet now you know it lies beyond those hills. The darkness after is no longer the darkness before. It becomes a place you wait through, not a place you settled in. And that raises another question: how do you wait for the next flash of clarity without forcing it?
Why it matters Comfort for those who had revelations they cannot keep: the moment of clarity counts even though it passes.