On the view from my bed
May 15, 2026
I woke up to the same view as every day. I meditated sitting on my bed, and when I opened my eyes again, I found myself thinking about my little altar in front of the bed. The photo of my friends. The mirror ball that turns the room into a dance floor at around 9am. My late grandfather’s pack of cards. I’ve always liked building little altars, but as soon as you get used to the way things are arranged, they start to go unnoticed. We need to reactivate our altars. Move things around.
What followed my meditation was another meditative exercise. I began to question what I surround myself with, how and why I've placed these things around me and what effect they have. I then made myself change a few things up for novelty's sake, so it doesn't crystallise into an untouched corner of my room. I want the magazines and the records and the cards, too, to be picked up and put to use.
This heightened attention to something so deeply woven into my daily life reminded me of an episode from high school. During the pandemic, I was studying Visual Arts and classes had moved online. My drawing teacher, whom I remember very fondly, gave us an assignment that consisted of designing our dream home. We were asked to provide a floor plan and a sketch (I think I painted a watercolour) of the façade. The brief was somewhat open-ended, but he suggested that, as a methodology, we pay close attention to our experience of isolation. Map our daily routes. Name the rooms we spent the most time in. Identify practical problems. As I write this, I realise I feel as though I may have told this story before. If that's the case, bear with me. What was so revealing about the exercise was that it prompted us to think about things that, for the most part, already felt settled in our lives, and which we therefore moved through without giving much thought. There is something both poetic and productive about looking at them closely.
All of this is to say that I highly recommend exercising the mind in this way, feeding deeper reflections on the view from your balcony, the journey to work, or lunch at your favourite restaurant. This is very much aligned with the idea of “first times”. Sure, you can't have a second first time, but there are always new perspectives to discover. You have to remain a little open to the feeling of novelty if you want it to find its way to you.
