or rather, take a look from a different direction, with rested eyes, from a different perspective - whatever you like really. But sometimes being happy or content is really about how you choose to see things are.
It's the basis of the title of this blog really and I can tell you this without going into the full story just yet. It's not that I'm being secretive for the sake of it, you understand, just that I want to tell the story in the right way at the right time. But 'Smiling at Magpies' is about choosing to see something that previously scared you in a positive way. Like magpies. As usual, I'm nothing if not obvious!
Taking time to look up, look round or down can also help you to see things that you didn't see before, I find. Even on the simplest level.
Mum and I went for a walk around the beautiful Clumber Park lake again recently - something we've done many times before - but chose to walk round in a anti-clockwise, rather than our usual clockwise, direction. It was quite incredible just how many 'new' things we saw on this route.
Of course, they weren't new at all really, they had always been there, but just by walking in a different direction we had opened up a whole new aspect to the walk.
The four or so miles around the lake also seemed to take much longer - though in actual fact it didn't and I'm relieved to say it wasn't because of my fading (but soon to be regained) fitness!
It was because when we experience new things we don't go into 'auto pilot', as we are prone to doing in our daily routine - I'm sure I'm not the only one to have arrived somewhere in the car and not known how I got there. Scary, yes?
Staying with the example of car journeys to illustrate this phenomenon, it's like driving somewhere for the second time and it feeling like it took you much less time than it did the first. It didn't, but there was less new information for your brain to take in, so it drifted on to other things, or didn't have to work as hard...or something like that.
Basically, I heard once that the reason time seems to pass so much quicker as we get older is that we've experienced much of what we are doing before - not in a freaky deja vu sense, but in a slightly dull, hum-drum routine way - so our brains don't need to tune in as much. Thus the reason it seems like school holidays seem to fly by now, when they used to drag - and I say this as an appreciater of quiet non term-time roads, I realise my opinion may change when I experience the joys of parenthood!
So, the key to slowing life down and appreciating things more is to take different routes, do different things - and not necessarily things that cost much money either* - meet different people.
I very much needed to learn this lesson recently - about slowing down, that is - when I had been in a whirl, a tizz even, and managed to lose my diary and notebook (notes from the last six months of meetings, pretty valuable stuff to me).
The fact that my tizz had meant I couldn't even remember the last time that day I had them as I'd gone from event to event, and they were eventually recovered on top of a pay machine in a multistorey car park in Manchester - thank you again to the kind, mystery soul who handed them in - was a bit of a wake-up call really, and a sign that I needed to take another look about how I was organising myself.
So, being given the opportunity to see things differently is a gift. One that I am increasingly grateful for. It helps us realise that we have a choice and that things happen for a reason.
See you later
Clancy xxxx
*catch me every month for ideas of things to do across West Yorkshire as BBC Radio Leeds's Girl About Town - I'll post details here for next time!
