Slow down and appreciate the everyday beauty of the world

AS I’M writing this today, I can hear a bird chirping in the background, unusually the sun is pouring into my office as it is reflected by my neighbour’s window opposite, the sky is a beautiful clear blue without a cloud in sight.

From where I am sat I can see buds on the trees and shrubs, daffodils and tulips in full bloom; there is even a tiny primrose flower next to a rose bush which is coming back to life. The road, which is normally busy at this time, is peaceful and quiet. It’s an ordinary scene, but there is a simple beauty about it too.

Before I understood how my mind worked, I would innocently miss all of this. I would be so caught up in my own thoughts that there would be no time or space to sit and appreciate it. I wouldn’t see it. That has always fascinated me how we can so often not see what is right in front of us.

I have enormous sympathy for that version of me now, for how much I struggled. My head full of stress and worry, almost every thought I had was prefixed with ‘‘what if ’’ and then my imagination would go wild, giving me permission to create all sorts of scenarios and outcomes, all of which would cause me no end of stress and fear. My poor busy head, trying to work out what would happen in the future, endlessly worrying about what other people thought and then criticising myself for what had happened and how my life would be so much better if I just didn’t always mess it up.

I remember the first time I realised that my thoughts weren’t as true as I had thought, that just because I had a thought that was worrying it didn’t mean something bad would happen. I realised just because I had a thought like that, it didn’t mean that I had to engage with it, create countless contingency plans because of it; it didn’t mean it was something I had to rely on, to take into account.

It was simply one insecure thought, and when I paid less attention to it, it passed by, my own mind became quieter because I was naturally doing less thinking. I wasn’t innocently making that one thought a thousand thoughts.

I then began to see that my insecure thoughts had no information in at all. No matter how hard I tried I couldn’t predict the future, I didn’t know what was going to happen, whether it was going to be how I expected it to be or not.

I couldn’t read people’s minds, I didn’t know what they were thinking, I didn’t know if they were thinking about me or something else. And more importantly, I couldn’t change what had happened in the past and I didn’t know how that would impact the future.

I found that the more I noticed, the less extra thinking I naturally did and the more space I began to find in my own mind. I was calmer, quieter. There was a beautiful peace that I hadn’t felt in a very long time and I began to enjoy that peace. I saw more beauty around me too, just in the simple, everyday things, but it was there. It had always been there, I just hadn’t seen it before.