The Space to Notice
Last week I took an afternoon out and went to Dartmouth, a beautiful coastal town here in Devon.
I’d had a hectic week and needed to slow my mind down in order to notice in my thoughts and feelings what I might be missing.
What followed was surprisingly profound.
It was as though I had entered a world in slow motion.
People walked along the promenade at a gentle pace. Some alone, others in couples or small groups. There seemed to be no particular urgency to get anywhere.
They stopped to look at the boats passing by, to take in the view across the estuary, or simply to listen when someone else was talking.
There was a sense of real presence and intention in it all. Not intention in the sense of having somewhere to be or something to achieve, but an intention to actually be there and fully engage with whatever had caught their attention.
The boats seemed almost to move under their own momentum, calmly crossing the water.
Even the car ferries with their passengers, moving back and forth across the estuary, pushed along by little tugboats, seemed to have surrendered to the pace of the river.
There was space for every sound to be heard, and even the seagulls seemed less frantic.
It was quite infectious, and as I watched and listened, something in me began to slow down too.
My mind became less busy. I started noticing things that interested me and that I might normally have walked straight past. I began to hear my own thoughts and notice feelings that had previously been lost in the noise.
It made me wonder how often the pace we operate at has very little to do with the pace of life itself, and more to do with the belief that busyness is productive, when sometimes the opposite can be true.
How much of our busyness is actually necessary?
How often do we fill the space simply because we don't know what might emerge if we left it empty?
And what might we notice, think or create if we gave ourselves a little more time to simply be where we are?
I left Dartmouth feeling more stimulated and with more clarity than I had expected.
Not because I had achieved anything in particular, because for a few hours, I hadn't needed to.
But what that space gave me in return was perspective and clarity on what had taken me there in the first place.
Perhaps that's the real value of slowing down.
Not simply to stop, but to create enough space to see things differently.
If you're feeling caught up in busyness, confusion or overwhelm, and finding it difficult to see things clearly, sometimes having the space to step back, notice and talk things through can help. If that feels relevant to where you are, feel free to get in touch.