Sometimes, without warning, the past opens its eyes.
You’re walking along through an ordinary place, a shopping centre, a side street, an alleyway, and suddenly the air shifts.
A small echo moves through you. Not a voice, but a feeling.
A childhood memory emerges, not as a thought, but as a visitation.
You remember standing at a taxi rank, small hands reaching out to open doors for strangers, not for money, not for praise, but because you had seen someone do it, and it felt noble.
You wanted to help.
You wanted to belong to something kind.
You saw service as sacred, even if no one else noticed.
And for a brief moment, you’re there again. Not just remembering, but becoming.
Later, you’re walking through an alleyway near where your old house used to be, before the fire, before everything changed. You pass a small alcove in the bricks in the alleyway and your body remembers before your mind even catches up.
You used to hide in that space. Wait, giggling. Then leap out and “scare” your parents, even though they always knew where you were.
It was a game a ritual. A dance of being lost and found.
And now, years later, that space remembers you. As if the wall itself held your laughter in its pores. As if it never stopped waiting for you to return.
And then a thought dawns
How many children have done the same?
How many alcoves, trees, fences, stairwells, and empty garages have become sacred temples of joy, hiding, and becoming?
The answer is – Innumerable.
As an adult, finding a pound is basically neutral. But as a child?
It’s limitless possibility in a shiny circle.
It’s “I can have something!”
It’s agency. Choice. A little jolt of independence.
But above all, it’s SWEETIES.
The purest form of reward in childhood currency.
The fact that your adult self sat under a tree, tired or waiting, and the inner child suddenly rose to the surface with “SWEETIES 😜” that’s no accident.
This is reclamation at work.
Because the sacred is not just in steeples and sermons.
It’s in the brick walls that knew your hiding place.
It’s in the tiled floors that caught your dance.
It’s in the bench where you first looked at the sky and asked why, or the tree where you would pretend to fly.
✨ A Soft Reminder
Every place that held your joy, your innocence, your play, is a living archive.
And when you walk through it again, something opens.
Not a memory but a doorway.
You’re not going back in time.
You’re retrieving lost fragments of yourself.
The versions of you that never stopped waiting. Never stopped hoping you’d remember.
And here you are.
🕯️ An Invitation
Next time you’re in an ordinary place, pause.
Let the memory rise.
Let the child come forward.
Don’t rush them.
Don’t explain them away.
Just listen.
Feel the breath catch in your chest.
Let the ache and the wonder move through you.
And maybe, just maybe
Open a door for someone.
Hide in a silly place and pretend to surprise someone who already sees you.
Laugh.
Re-enter the temple of the ordinary.
Remember what it is to belong to the world without needing to be anything other than true.