Have you ever found a place you would describe as “unique”? Let’s call it a “secret place”, not because it is hidden, or private, not because it’s one of the most beautiful places on earth, but because of how it makes you feel once you find it. Because something about it makes you want to call it “yours”.
As you start playing with this idea, you may have different images and memories come to your mind: A flourished garden, or an abandoned mansion you guiltily admire from a fence, an isolated empty beach overlooking the ocean, or a hot and thud sound terrace on the rooftop of a building…
What does yours look like?
What makes this place become “your place”? It is not the amount of time you have been there, quantity does not matter, but quality. It is all related to your thoughts and feelings. I believe you can sometimes connect to a place as to a person. This bond helps you reach out to yourself in the first place, and you may stay there for hours or a few minutes, inhaling the perfume in the air, feeling the breeze on your shoulders, closing your eyes in the last raise of sun. Here you may find it easier to focus, to reach a sense of stillness. Just a moment with yourself. Isn’t this the very essence of tranquillity?
I’ve experienced a few places like this back in my hometown and didn’t quite reflect before about what it would be like while traveling. But now it appears to me that although I know I might not return to them, it is not rare to find places like this even when you are constantly moving. At the corner of a botanical garden in Singapore, walking in a rain forest in Australia, sitting above a skyline in Malaysia or catching the ferry between the south and north island in New Zealand… These “nests” allowed me to take big breaths and acknowledge how far I’d come. To sense and be peaceful.
And I like the idea they might also be someone’s special place.
