I have a habit that probably makes me look slightly distracted.
Whenever I come across an opening in a wall, I stop and look through it.
Not every now and then.
Every single time.
A gap in an old stone wall.
An open gate.
A doorway leading somewhere unexpected.
I can't help myself.
I have to look.
The strange thing is that I don't necessarily want to go there.
I just want to see it.
What's on the other side?
A garden?
An orchard?
A forgotten path?
A view I wasn't expecting?
Most of the time, it isn't anything particularly remarkable.
And yet I always feel a tiny sense of excitement before I look.
As though there might be.
The older I get, the more I realise how much I enjoy these small moments of discovery.
Not the big discoveries.
The little ones.
The kind that make you stop for a few seconds and think:
"Oh."
"I didn't know that was there."
Living in Portugal has given me plenty of opportunities to indulge this habit.
There are old walls everywhere.
Some crumbling.
Some covered in moss.
Some standing proudly in the middle of nowhere as if they have completely forgotten what they were built for in the first place.
And many of them contain openings.
Little invitations to look closer.
To pay attention.
To wonder.
Sometimes I find myself staring through a gap in a wall and imagining the people who stood there before me.
Did they stop and look too?
Or did they already know what was on the other side?
Perhaps that is part of the appeal.
I don't know.
What I do know is that I rarely regret looking.
Life seems to work that way sometimes.
The things that stay with us are often not the things we planned.
They are the things we noticed.
A path we almost walked past.
A conversation that lasted longer than expected.
A fox appearing at exactly the right moment.
A view framed by an old stone wall.
Not life-changing.
Not dramatic.
Just enough to make the world feel a little larger than it did a moment ago.
And perhaps that is what I am really looking for every time I stop at one of those openings.
Not answers.
Not certainty.
Just a glimpse of something I hadn't seen before.
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