Restorative Matters
Perspective and the space it reveals
A tall, thin man, I would guess in his seventies, was seated at the very centre table in the dining room of a Parisian restaurant.
You could hear the audible chatter of the other guests, but it felt muted against his stoic presence, one that carried a sense of authority that was almost eerie.
There were no spotlights in the dining hall, and yet it felt as though there was one fixed on his table, as if the light in the room was already bending around him, and he hadn’t even uttered a word.
The waiter hovered by the door of the kitchens, hesitated, and then carefully made his way over to the man’s table.
This guest was not someone you rushed.
There was a brief exchange.
Polite and measured.
When asked if he was ready to order, he didn’t ask for a particular dish, neither did he ask what was good.
He ordered something else entirely.
Something that wasn’t listed on the menu.
Something that required a response rather than him making a simple choice.
“Know what I’m craving?” he said, as the waiter stood expectantly.
“A little perspective.”
He snapped the red menu in front of him shut, and before the waiter had a chance to respond, he continued.
“That’s it. I’d like some fresh, clear perspective.”
Anton Ego, the character from one of my favourite Disney films, Ratatouille, was Paris’s most infamous critic.
So whenever I hear the word perspective, my mind returns to that exact scene from the film, and I hear his voice saying those words.
In fact, I can almost hear them now.
Direct and precise.
“That’s it. I’d like some fresh, clear perspective. Well-seasoned.”
In neurodivergent terminology, this phenomenon is often referred to as echolalia, where words, sounds, phrases or snippets of dialogue become attached to meaning and replay internally with remarkable clarity.
A fresh perspective is exactly what I have needed of late.
Not because anything in my life requires dramatic change, but because modern life, as it is for so many of us, can begin to feel deeply repetitive.
And that repetition can begin to dull life at the edges.
A fresh perspective has a beautiful way of cutting through that, quite literally like a hot knife through butter.
And for me, that sense of something slicing through, of something brightning, came from a visit to the magnificent castle in my little town.
I call it magnificent, although in truth it is a ruin.
Built after the Norman Conquest, what remains now is the stone wall and the keep.
Modest in structure.
What is truly magnificent, though, is the 360 degree view.
Standing at the top on its circular turret, looking out over all angles of the town, something changes.
The air feels different up here, as does, dare I say it, the 'energy.'
Looking down at the rooftops of my town, feeling the clarity up here, reminds me of how thick cloud or smog can settle lower, gathering where the air is still, thickening closer to the ground.
But being up here today, it almost feels as though the weight of everyday life is behaving in the same way as that smog, as if the energy of human interaction is collecting, heavy and dense at street level, right up to the tops of the roofs, thickening where human activity is busiest.
All that modern life-ness collecting in a kind of fog down there below.
I hear conversations, or the remnants them - some of which I can hear travelling on the wind, still somewhat inaudible.
The distant sounds of arguments, laughter, the hopes, the dreams, and the mundane tasks of everyday life.
The cooking.
The cleaning.
The childcare.
Domestic life.
But up here? Up here it feels cleaner.
As if that density sits just below the rooftops, and what remains above it is lighter.
There’s something almost exhilarating about it.
Reviving.
Easier to breathe in.
And with it, something in me also clears.
But perhaps none of that is happening in any literal sense.
Perhaps it is merely symbolic.
As if, just for a moment, I am able to stand and observe it, like stepping out of a fast-moving river, able to stand at the edge, this time watching the movement of water instead of being pulled and carried by it.
There is something particular about becoming a tourist in a place you know well.
The shapes are unchanged.
The layout familiar.
But the angles are new.
From above, I notice the spaces between things.
The gaps.
The distance.
Down below, in the middle of it all, I tend to see only what is directly in front of me.
One thing, then the next.
Up here, it widens.
Rooftops.
Lines of streets.
The way everything sits together rather than separately.
It feels almost like a slight change in vision.
A different vantage point.
When I climb back down the steps, I won’t be the same.
Not in any dramatic way of course, but I will be carried the lightness of that fresh perspective, if only for a while, until it fades, overshadowed by the thick smog of life’s demands.
A new way of looking can opens things out.
And standing at the top of the castle, I realise that perspective is not only about seeing differently.
It is also about spaciousness.
Slight distance creates room around things.
Room to observe instead of immediately react, to notice patterns rather than individual demands.
Room for thoughts and feelings to unfold fully instead of colliding into one another.
Perhaps this is why perspective can feel both exhilarating, and yet at the time restorative.
Not because our lives suddenly change beneath us, but because for a moment there is enough space for us to see clearly again.
Maybe this is why unfamiliarity can feel strangely enlivening.
A different route home.
Walking through somewhere familiar as though you have never seen it before.
Even stepping back into a beginner’s class can do it.
Because there is something deeply refreshing about allowing yourself to not already have to know.
Resisting the urge and expectation to perform confidence.
To drop a little bit of certainty long enough to experience something from a slightly different vantage point.
As somebody who loves to read, I only really truly enjoy reading on a Sunday morning.
Sunday is a beautiful day anyway, but especially so before the house has filled up with the microtasks of everyday life.
Before the day gathers its pace.
I've noticed that later, the same book sits there.
Nothing about the book or my interest in it has changed.
But by then, my attention is thinner.
Easier to pull away.
And perhaps by then I have limited space for what books do so beautifully for us.
They give us a different perspective.
Whether we are enjoying a fictional story where, for a few moments, we feel we become somebody else entirely, or whether we are reading thoughtful prose gently ushering us to rethink something from a different vantage point.
If I miss my quiet reading window on a Sunday morning, I often reach for something else.
Something that matches the pace the day is already in.
Sometimes, though, the answer is to physically place ourselves somewhere the atmosphere itself feels cleaner, clearer, and less complicated.
Such as a walk in the beautiful spring sunshine.
You may find yourself stepping into a cool, slightly damp woodland.
The temperature drops almost instantly.
The light changes.
Dappled sunlight flickers through moving leaves overhead while the earthy scent of rainwater, bark and soil rises quietly from the ground below.
Look closely and you’ll notice it.
Fluffy, tactile clusters of soft green feathers spreading themselves across rocks, fallen branches and stone walls.
Moss gathers where the air holds enough moisture to sustain it.
Often deep green or vibrant lime in colour, almost luminous in low light, it spreads close to the ground, softening stone, retaining just the right amount of water as it settles into its surroundings without any sense of urgency.
I have a particular love of moss, as if the sight of it is somehow able to instantly quell my swirling, busy human mind.
Nothing about it suggests that something else is about to arrive.
It simply exists.
Full and complete in its fluffy self.
Perfectly placed between light, moisture and shade.
Every time I see moss,
I have to resist a strong temptation to carefully peel it from its chosen place and stuff it into my pocket.
As if taking a small piece of that green velvet back into my human life, my home, my calendar and my to-do list might somehow allow its balanced stillness to rub off on me.
Perhaps this is why the Japanese have long held such affection for the practice of kokedama, where plants wrapped in spheres of moss are placed gently on trays, shelves and coffee tables as living sculptures.
Small pockets of cultivated stillness sustained within the home amongst modern human conveniences.
And as much as I am tempted to tuck my newfound moss friend into my pocket and smuggle it home, I know only too well that it would likely only destine the moss for a slow death.
Despite the temptation to believe I would lovingly spritz it with water each day, the moss and I both know this would not happen.
Yet another small aggression upon the natural world.
Another small example of that deeply human tendency to remove beautiful things from their place, and that sense of entitlement that convinces us they might somehow belong more to our needs than they do to their natural environment.
And so, slightly ashamed at the thought of it, and at my overall humanness, I rightly leave the moss to enjoy its woodland delight.
I wonder whether there may be something in this that explains why moss feels the way it does to me.
In yogic philosophy, Ayurveda, which loosely translates as “the science of life,” is a fascinating system that sits alongside yoga.
If yoga asks questions about how we live, Ayurveda becomes interested in what conditions help us live well.
At its core there are three constitutions, or doshas: vata, pitta and kapha.
Vata is associated with air and movement.
Dryness.
Lightness.
The swirling quality of wind.
Pitta carries heat.
Transformation.
Sharpness and intensity
.
Kapha is different altogether.
Earthy.
Moist.
Grounded.
Slow-moving.
The rich stillness of damp forests and fertile soil.
I think perhaps that is what draws me so deeply towards moss.
It feels profoundly 'kapha.'
By comparison, modern life often feels extraordinarily 'vata.'
Constant movement and endless stimulation.
That pulls our thought in too many directions at once.
And once I am back in my usual environment, the winds of modern life would return.
The once adored moss would sit on the side somewhere, while I promise myself to spritz it daily to keep the humidity up, knowing deep down that would never happen, certainly not after the initial enthusiasm dipped in the first few days.
Life would rush back in the moment I returned from my walk, like a vacuum, desperate to fill the space the walk outside created, wrapping itself around my ankles and spiralling upwards, demanding my complete attention.
And so that soft green velvet that once felt so calming in the forest would become forgotten on a shelf somewhere as life rushed back in around it.
Emails.
Washing.
Messages.
Surfaces to clear.
Things to organise.
The moss wouldn’t stand a chance.
Simply not enough stillness around it to survive alongside me.
Not enough kapha to soften the modern vata of life.
As much as I demonise busyness though, there is a particular satisfaction in crossing another thing off a list.
Sending the message.
Making that phone call, clearing the surface.
Putting the washing away.
Even though, almost immediately, something else takes its place.
Another task, and another small piece of life stepping forward, demanding to be handled.
And we all know that that list never really ends.
The satisfaction is real, but often brief.
Completion offers relief, but not necessarily perspective.
And perhaps that is why, every so often, we find ourselves longing for something else entirely.
Most of the time, when we intentionally create space in our lives, a new viewpoint has an opportunity to arrive.
But sometimes perspective catches us off guard and becomes forced upon us.
Occasionally this happens through something life-altering.
A sudden illness, or unexpected change in the path we thought we were walking.
Sometimes life insists upon a different perspective with such force that we have no choice but to stop and look at things differently.
But not always in such dramatic ways.
Only this evening, a loved one showed me a piece of art they had produced that I was not expecting to encounter.
It shook me to my core.
I found myself sobbing in a way I had not for a very long time.
Not because the piece itself mirrored my own life exactly, but because great art has a way of illuminating parts of ourselves, we had not fully seen.
This is what great art can do.
It offers us perspective.
It cuts clean through the noise for a moment and rearranges the shape of things.
Despite feeling deeply moved by this piece though, life returned astonishingly quickly.
Tea still needed cooking.
Conversations continued about what time we would leave in the morning.
My autistic daughter hovered on the edge of overwhelm, needing support and regulation.
The perspective the art had opened within me began, quite quickly, to dull beneath the ordinary demands of my life.
Not because it mattered less, but because there was so little space around it to sit with it.
Perhaps this is partly why the phrase holding space has become so meaningful in therapeutic and facilitation settings.
Because often what people truly need is not fixing or solutions.
Rather, we all need protection from interruption long enough for perspective, emotion, grief, insight or healing to unfold.
A temporary shelter for the modern human experience.
And one place modern life still struggles profoundly to hold space is around death.
Here in the West, we have, quite frankly, a shockingly difficult relationship with it.
We call it “loss”, and I understand that.
Grief can feel totally emptying to process.
Though as someone with spiritual beliefs, I am not entirely sure anyone is truly lost.
And to frame it as such through language sets our understanding of it within a very limited framework.
No wonder we often process death as such a desperate and all-consuming experience.
If anything, it can feel as though we are the ones left disoriented in the aftermath of another person’s absence.
And yet our culture often expects grief to fit itself neatly around productivity, administration and timelines.
There are often many calls to make.
Forms to complete.
Possessions to sort through.
Responsibility can take the place of any real container of space being held open.
The weight of it sits alongside the loss.
Practical life rushes in astonishingly quickly around profound emotional change.
And then, so often, once the practicality of the person’s absence is finally completed, but still long before people have even begun to understand what they are feeling, there can already be an unspoken pressure to appear functional again.
So when someone we love dies, there is very little space left around it.
There is absence, which can feel vast, endless and empty, but conversely offers no true space.
Or if it does, it is somewhere, but it has to be fitted in.
Between one task and the next.
After all of this is said and done though, I don’t think I would want less life.
I wouldn’t trade the fullness of it for something simpler.
I am simply beginning to notice how much depends on where we are standing when we meet that fullness.
Sometimes it is not the moments themselves, it is our vantage point within them.
This is the strange relationship between perspective and space
Perspective creates space.
But more often than not, we first have to make a little space in order for perspective to arrive.
A walk to the castle.
A Sunday morning book before the house fills.
A slow moment appreciating tiny feathers of deep green moss.
An unexpected piece of art.
Small openings.
Small acts of stepping sideways out of the current.
Just enough to remember that perhaps life itself was never asking us to move faster.
Only to occasionally pause long enough to notice where we are standing within it
