What gives me direction in life?

Not a five-year plan. Not a motivational quote printed over a fake mountain. Not some clean little compass sold by people who say “mindset” with the solemnity of undertakers. Direction, in my case, comes from walking until reality trips over itself and accidentally tells the truth.

Here, for example, a woman passes through the frame as if she has just remembered she is late for her own life. She is blurred, half-present, already leaving. Behind her, on the wall, someone has written the kind of sentence that sounds stupid until you realise it is probably the most accurate theology available in the neighbourhood: “Life is trolling. Make it sweet.”

Beside the words, an old painted man with a walker points nowhere in particular. A prophet, naturally. Not one of those expensive prophets with a podcast and white teeth, but the better kind: thin, black, badly sprayed, anonymous, and nailed to a wall on a street corner. His message is not “follow your dreams.” His message is: you will slow down, you will need support, the pavement will remain indifferent, and still you may as well keep moving.

That gives me direction.

The city does not explain itself. It drops clues. A shadow. A gesture. A woman turning her face. A bin placed exactly where dignity goes to retire. A sentence written by someone who may have been drunk, lucid, desperate, or all three, which is often the same artistic department with different office hours.

I do not trust grand answers. Grand answers are usually furniture for empty rooms. I trust friction. I trust the small humiliations of the street. The unexpected joke. The bad wall. The passing body. The fact that everything serious eventually has to share space with rubbish bags, scooters, delivery vans, chewing gum, and someone shouting into a phone as if history were customer service.

Direction is not certainty. Certainty is for GPS devices and fanatics, two species that speak too confidently and recalculate badly. Direction is a bias toward attention. It is choosing to look again when the world seems already used up. It is admitting that the scene in front of you, ugly and accidental, may know more than your tidy opinions.

Photography helps because it refuses to let life become entirely abstract. You can have principles, ideas, ambitions, a whole private parliament of noble excuses. Then the street interrupts: a face cuts across the frame, the wall laughs at you, the light collapses, and suddenly everything you thought was important has to prove itself at 1/500 of a second.

That is a useful cruelty.

Hope is fine, but it has been overmarketed. I prefer appetite. The appetite to keep noticing. To keep walking. To keep finding sweetness in the troll, because bitterness is too obedient. Bitterness does exactly what the world expects of a person who has been paying attention. Sweetness, when it is honest, is more insulting. It says: I saw the mess. I understood the joke. I am still here.

So no, I do not have a luminous path. I have corners. Walls. Blurred strangers. Accidents. Bad advice that turns out to be good. A camera. A pair of tired eyes. The suspicion that the next street may be slightly less dead than the last one.

That is enough direction for one life. More would probably become branding.

More Urban Wildlife here.