Pause for Thought | Rae Duke | The Zoe Ball Breakfast Show, BBC R2 | 2nd May 2019
Tomorrow’s a big day for me, and my husband and baby, as we’re moving house! We spent the weekend clearing out and packing up (and yep, I did try to subscribe to Marie Kondo’s de-cluttering method that involves only keeping stuff that ‘sparks joy’!)
As D-day approaches we’ve found ourselves jumping from total eagerness to be in our new home to sentimentally reflecting on the big-life-moments met and memories made in our flat: the highlights - fun parties, singsongs around the piano, bringing our daughter home from hospital, and lowlights - receiving sad news, consoling friends and burning a lasagna or three.
The hashtag #thebestisyettocome has an astonishing 1.2 million posts on one platform alone. Hopefulness - being future embracing - is a popular mindset. The Christian pastor Joel Osteen uses the design of a car to illustrate this: “you’ve got a big windshield on the front. And you’ve got a little bitty rearview mirror… because what’s happened in your past is nowhere near as important as what lies in your future.”
With moving house fostering a deeper sense of life as a pilgrimage, (my primary school self wants to burst into a verse of hymn ‘One more step along the world I go…’) I loved hearing author Paolo Coelho speak so inspiringly recently on the idea of pilgrimage not being just a physical journey, but a state of mind too.
Maybe over Easter you watched the BBC2 series, ‘Pilgrimage, The Road to Rome’ and longed for an adventure involving a rucksack, somewhere new and the chance to abandon all responsibility – and it’s amazing if you’re able to do that, but obviously popping to see the Pope as those lucky celeb pilgrims did isn’t always doable.
Paolo Coelho believes that by paying attention to seemingly minute things in life and being open to its path, it’s not just the biggies like moving house or trekking to Rome that hold the possibility for new discovery. All of life has the potential for exciting, meaningful experience as we put one foot in front of the other, smell the roses and progress forward.
So as I drive toward our new home tomorrow morning, watching our old one disappear in my rearview mirror, I’ll try not to shed a tear but embrace this new chapter of my life’s pilgrimage. I’m sure plenty more burnt lasagnas lie ahead!