It can be very difficult to see things from someone else’s point of view, can’t it? Not perhaps, because we don’t want to, but it can be hard to imagine thinking differently from how we do.
In my more corporate days, we did lots of training in personality types and behaviours, all to help us stop thinking that other people were mad/difficult/annoying/deliberately obstructive, and to enable us to see how they thought and then, the PhD level, try to communicate with them in their preferred way. It was fantastic, and I still quietly utilise the knowledge today, though it doesn’t apply to the cat!
Walking a different route can also enable one to see the world differently. If you have normal routes (which I do) it can be easy not to see anything fresh.
So, I went off-piste and walked out of the village along a lane that currently runs through farmland, but with the Wild West of land-selling round here, might not be for long.
And there was an apple tree that honestly, I have never seen before. Of course I have seen it before. I’ve lived here for three years. But, laden with fruit, it was as new to me as if I had never walked along this lane.
With that freshness in mind, I kept my eye out for anything else that was new, or seasonal. And there it all was: blackberries, hips and haws in the hedgerows, richly fecund, unlike my year’s vegetable gardening.
The road was dotted with horse poo, which made me wistful for the many years when I was riding round lanes, not walking them, practically able to see the coast of France from my horse’s back, caught up in the moment, the teamwork, the bond.
Just as wistfulness was about to make me maudlin, a horse lorry drove past, the driver waving cheerily, and I realised that there’s no point in looking back to an unreachable past, or to a future that may never exist.
All we have is now, and we’re lucky to get it, as the alternative isn’t being younger and slimmer.
I walked on, setting my heart and mind on the here-and-now, the late summer hedgerows, the slight mist over the ploughed fields, the still-warm air.
If I’d walked my usual route, I’d never have thought this, and it’s a lesson that I’ve taken with me through the subsequent days. I’ll be walking different routes over the winter, just to see what they teach me.
