how I found a childhood memory (when I stepped out of the brackets)

I’m on a mini holiday and I just took an early morning walk to explore the new surroundings. It’s a combination of blocks of flats, big streets – empty and quiet at that hour, and a fair amount of greenfield sites. Those are undeveloped lands that are often left to evolve naturally. Here, these are wild, green areas, making for a stark contrast with the heavy urban architecture.

This landscape is quite familiar to the one I grew up in. I lived in a tower block - ah, that Soviet-era architecture! Close-by, there was a full-blown greenfield land (with time it turned into a wild football field, a car park, and finally a supermarket; what an emblematic fate!).

To a boy I was back then, this greenfield land felt like a magical garden. It was teeming with all sorts of greenery, weeds, flowers, wild plants. The cool thing was that many of those were higher than I. A true adventure it was to dive into this abundance of wildlife. And don’t even get me started on birds, animals, insects…

Large green grasshoppers might have been the coolest and, with them, let me hop back to the present times again.

The morning walk was great. The best thing about it is that it was pretty unstructured. I rambled around the new neighbourhood, witnessing the arrival of a new day. I was unrushed, there was no moving from point A to point B. In other words, it was a proper discovery mode. In that space, I was able to connect with this dear childhood memory, and with parts of myself that have been long dormant.

I reckon that it could do us good to schedule unstructured time more often. Most of the time, we put ourselves in brackets, so to speak. At any given time, we are enclosed between two such brackets: two activities, two places, two calendar items, two projects. This enclosure can be useful – it gives us structure. But it’s also nice to hang out between brackets sometimes. “Unbracketing” ourselves can take us out of a to-do mode and put us in a to-be and to-feel space.

A lot of my nicest memories come from being in that in-between place. I wonder if the same could be true for you?