small change


Over a month ago I started taking the time to go for a walk and sometimes even a few hundred metre run, before breakfast along the very quiet roads. I have gone almost every day since, with an ill-fitting high-vis jacket (they own the road, they will not see you) over leggings and t-shirt and a pair of tattered canvas shoes. I have always been a good walker, and I above all loved being an urban walker, day or night, but with the life that I have made for myself here in this very rural place, a walk was never on the agenda. I do walk to the animals on hoof- or foot-made paths, with things in my arms or on my back, but I had pretty much stopped walking to walk and think and ponder and sift.
There are a lot of days that I do not pass a car and I feel that I could be anywhere on earth, and I have been reflecting on the notion of ‘holiday’. The holiday that you give to yourself by trying new things in your everyday life and the time you organize to spend completely on your own, looking at the sky, and how you sometimes need to travel for that, to allow yourself that freedom, and how if you manage to blend it in your normal life delicately and evenly, like firm egg whites, it is somehow more yours, and certainly more lasting and more precious, I find.
A gift. Like quiet moments in your foreign hotel room when you know that you are there for no one. You can carry that feeling everywhere with you, in a drizzly morning too.

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