Monthly Musing – September 2025 – A whole new world

Sometimes, when I’m out with the dog, I imagine what it would be like if I had never seen where we are walking before.

I don’t just mean the area or the particular path we’re walking on – what would it be like if I had only just arrived on Earth and I had never seen grass, or clouds in the sky, or heard a bird singing?  What if the first living thing that I saw was our dog, trundling along in front of me sniffing at the grass … would I think that every being on Earth looked like him?

You might think this is a sign of me descending into madness, but it actually makes me look more closely at what’s around me and makes me feel more present on our walks.  I never walk with headphones in but I do get lost in my thoughts, sometimes noodling on a pattern idea or what I’m going to write in a blog post; sometimes making lists or thinking about the day’s jobs; sometimes caught up in downward spirals of hormonal nonsense which can turn into something far worse than any disaster movie you’ve ever watched if I don’t catch it in time … fortunately, these days I can recognise the signs of the movie starting to play and head it off, and it’s become a habit to focus on something more pleasant instead.

Like being an alien on my own planet.  Well, why not?

I think it’s easy to go through the day on autopilot and very often I’ll get to the end of the day and think, “What have I done today?”  I don’t quite know what I expected to be doing with myself at my age with grown up children, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t hurtling through my days and having to think quite hard at the end of it about what I’ve been doing!

I’ve stopped telling myself that I don’t remember things any more and instead, I now say that I only remember what I need to.  That doesn’t always include what not so small daughter might have been doing at the weekend when she’s away from home, or what big daughter might have said she was having for dinner one night in the week, but I’ve found that telling myself that I am making room in my head for the important stuff by not having to try to remember every detail of everyone’s day has made a significant difference.

And back outdoors, looking at the grass on the footpath or the stalks of the harvested crops in the fields reminds me that there’s a whole natural world outside our front door that doesn’t change, and it pulls me back to the present.  I don’t have to remember what it will be doing because it will be doing its own thing, just as it always has done.  There have been sunsets every night for millennia.  Plants and trees have grown, watered by soft rainfall and warmed by the sunshine.  Birdsong has carried on the breeze and clouds have always been in the sky, sometimes white and fluffy, sometimes low and grey, heavy with unshed rain.  All I have to remember is to look at it again, and let go of whatever else is crowding into my head.

Imagine if you had never seen any of this before.  No snow, no autumn leaves, no cows or sheep, no anything we look at without seeing every day.  What would it be like to see it for the very first time?

It’s quite something to think about, isn’t it?