* Updated with a wonderful Virginia Woolf passage

Now that we know we have to move (see the second half of my previous post if you need an explanation), I’ve been looking at everything as if it’s for the last time. Sounds dramatic, but it feels very real … I won’t see the corn being harvested again in these fields, won’t walk the path by the stream to the bus anymore, the moon won’t shine into the bedroom, the white house won’t be in my photos of the Alps …

While it’s definitely a sad feeling, it’s also opened my eyes to what I consider “normal”. My normal won’t be my normal by the end of April next year – it will be the new owner’s normal. So, in order to soak it all in, I’ve been trying to appreciate more.

Of course, I’ve always appreciated what we have here, but sometimes you just don’t SEE it. There’s nothing quite like a change to make you realise what you have and are about to lose (hopefully when we find a new place, it will be lovely too – I couldn’t live in something dark or horrible).

This week, walking to and from the bus to work, I’ve stopped to appreciate the neighbourhood – to soak it in, rather than rushing by.

Serendipity may have played a part in all this too. For the month of October, there’s a free mindfulness course on the internet. Here is the link. Each day, the moderator speaks with experts from around the world on a mindful topic, from mindful eating to making the most of meditation and so on. I’ve found it really interesting.

While I find the moderator’s constant agreeing and mmhmm’ing quite annoying (and I just fast forward through the parts where she speaks, as I find her quite a vague interviewer, oops, sorry!) she does get some great, insightful answers from her guests. And the guided meditations from some of them are very relaxing. If you want to listen to the previous week’s worth, you have to make a donation, but if you log in every day from now on to hear that day’s speaker, it’s free. As always, I have no affiliation with this website whatsoever, just putting it out there for you to enjoy too.

Here are some more photos, taken mindfully, mind you, from the past week. 🙂

Maybe you can look at everything in your neighbourhood with fresh eyes this week too?

I’ve just remembered a lovely passage from To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, read while on a train somewhere in England in my early 20s, and written in a keepsake book which I brought to Switzerland. These are Lily’s thoughts:

“Here sitting on the world, she thought, for she could not shake herself free from the sense that everything this morning was happening for the first time, perhaps for the last time, as a traveller, even though he is half asleep, knows, looking out the train window, that he must look now, for he will never see that town, or that mule-cart, or that woman at work in the fields, again.”

Wishing you a wonderful day.