In yoga, at the very beginning, you get centred. You stand still, hands at your sides. A soft voice reminds you to be attuned to your feet pressing onto smooth wood, to gravity, to breathing in and breathing out. This is awareness, that wholesome kind of physical hum that comes from time well spent.

This is the stuff that keeps you young, sane and grateful no matter what maelstrom surrounds you.

Photography generates the same hum, don't you find?

With a camera in hand you walk softly. A camera demands consciousness, asks that you quiet yourself to note the light, beauty, pain, sorrow or joy in front of your lens in that moment.

For the record, count me among the pointers and shooters. The equipmentally challenged, the chronic cheapskates (by choice or by circumstance) who still want — regardless of technical proficiency — to take not just snapshots but interesting photographs that evoke feeling and memory and scent and wistfulness and hopes and dreams and all the rest.

There it is, how I love him, right there. The curve of his cheek, that smear of peanut butter. The way he looks at the sky, skeptical, when the clouds are fat with grey and weather. His boots, crunching on fresh snow. His hair, scruffing out from under the brim of his hat.

In yoga, at the very end, you return to the centre, lying still. A soft voice reminds you to be attuned to the effort you've made. And not to reflect on the perfection of movement, but on the trying of it.