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(Un)Important trivialities
A few weeks ago I asked my older son to hang the washing. It’s usually my job to do but I was ill and needed help. Later, when I came to the room where the clothes were hanged, I was taken by surprise to see that all T-shirts and sweatshirts were hanging upside down. I mean upside down from my point of view, clothespins attached to the shoulder parts instead of to the bottom parts as I do that. My first reaction was to go and redo that immediately but I remember too well how I hated when my mother told me to make beds and when I made them,…
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Playing roles
When I was a little girl, I assumed that people are either good or bad and play just one role in their lives. The role of their identity. When I was about 12 and my mother was complaining that teachers at school praised me whereas at home I was not that cooperative, I didn’t agree and couldn’t understand quite well what she was speaking about. It came much later that I realised that there was not just one role I played in my life and that there was nothing wrong about it. We take on many different roles, whether the traditional ones like the role of a mother, wife, boss,…
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Light and shadows
Sometimes there are details which appear repeatedly in a short time span of my life bringing together new meaning to me. It’s like when you take a lemon, sugar and water and prepare lemon juice from them. By taste, you can still distinguish the ingredients but you cannot separate them anymore and even their taste is not entirely the same. It is how it started with light and shadows this time. I like Robert Ludlum and his spy stories and yesterday I finished reading the 3rd instalment of his Bourne series. I came across a sentence there: “Hugging the shadows of the successive storefronts, Jason crept slowly forward.” My breathing…
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Lost in translation
Some time ago I read a book in the Czech language and came to a statement saying literally that every cloud has a silver lining. It sounded strange to me as I’d never heard anyone to say such a phrase or saying in Czech. It didn’t fit in at all. As the book was a Czech translation of the English original, it occurred to me that the phrase might have been translated literally regardless of its possible figurative meaning so I went to look it up in a dictionary. It proved my suspicion true explaining that the saying means that every sad or difficult situation has a positive side. Properly…
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Bee in my bonnet
There are doors which open in our lives and invite us to explore other rooms. We may discover their beauties, commonness or unpleasantness but they all leave some experience we should learn of. But of course, we all hope for the beauties… A few weeks ago I was invited to write a guest post for a “Vision and Verb” blog. I didn’t know the blog so I was browsing it for a while, reading some of its posts and looking for connections. I found motivation, inspiration, imagination and a wonderful group of cooperators and their guests. I agreed and wrote my guest post and started to participate in commenting. It’s…
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Different angles of looking
A few days ago while learning new vocabulary I read a sentence saying something like “the weather was changeable, with lots of showers and a few sunny spells”. That’s exactly what the weather has been like lately… It’s raining outside at the moment and when I’m looking out of the window I have to think about the importance of the angle at which we look at things and matters occurring in our lives. Let’s take the current case of our garden versus our son: We’ve cultivated quite a big part of the garden’s lawn and planted new grass seeds there. It had been quite time-consuming to water it by using…
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Wagon scenery
Do you know that feeling to go somewhere and all of a sudden be attracted to something although nobody around you can understand what you can see in it? It happens to me from time to time and then I take pictures I don’t intend to present anywhere as they would probably be seen as rather dull and boring. But I like them and keep coming back to them. Like this one with the wagons: I took it during one of our outings many years ago and I still remember the place and perceive the beauty of those wagons, lined up and waiting for their moment of importance. The wagons…
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Passers-by
I took the photo by a railway museum – you can see a carriage behind those windows. I liked both the contrast between the stone building and the new car and the colours. When I was looking at the photograph a few days ago, I had to think about another car… Sometimes there are things happening that influence us without our consent or decision. This way a car and its driver entered my life. I commute to work by my car, park the car by the wall of the areal where I work and go about 5 minutes to the building where my office is situated. My working hours are regular…
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Bent thinking
Generally and probably like everybody else, I am used to do things in a certain way and usually don’t question that way. But then a situation comes which doesn’t let me follow my way and I am forced to change the point of view and to bend my thinking more or less to deal with the situation. If I do it well, I reach a solution that seemed impossible at first. Like in the picture above. I liked the top of the building but I was not able to take the photo in the way I wanted. So I gave up and left the scene. A few hours later I…
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At the top
I took this photograph at the top of an interesting sandstone formation with narrow passages, so called “cat castle”. I lifted my head and there was this tree. I was enchanted by the scene. It seems that being “at the top” may be a wonderful experience but may also bring strong feeling of solitude and certain fragility…
