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Last night as I was rambling around Dublin in a Gothic ghost bus I saw things I have never seen before. No, not the fake tacky skeletons nor the supposed ghostly orbs in digital photographs, but a side of the city I live in that has always been hidden from me.

I loved the stories our nightly bard told, I enjoyed the quirky puns my companion made and even the slightly drunken visitors from England with their fake hair, tans and nails added an element of the bizarre. But while I wandered around an old ruin of a church in the dying light of the day, climbed a thousand year old steps in dusk and sat in complete darkness on a bus, I enjoyed the challenge of changing my point of view.

We all get so use to seeing things in a certain way, feeling a particular emotion and doing things in the same order that we forget  to use our creative side and mix up our perceptions. We have all built our own reality in which things are safe and comfortable, the problem is that we lose sight of how others could see things. Vincent Van Gogh saw 27 shades of grey and I’m always arguing with my mother about a particular shade of yellow, to me it is more orange! So who knows what the person next to you is seeing while looking at the exact same thing? After all even a butterfly has a different view of a flower than you do.

I sometimes envy how everything children see and experience is an adventure. It may take forever to walk a short distances but the fun they get out of picking up every stick, pointing out the different bugs and jump in all the puddles is undeniably more rewarding than the hectic walk most of us take to get from A to B. So maybe, like in that film The Dead Poets Society, getting up on a desk or chair to change the point of view of how we see things is the solution to more fun in life. At the very least it would give us a little bit of extra exercise and we might just spot the dust on the top of the cupboards from that angle, too.

So with lovely new memories of an old familiar city lingering in my mind today, I think I may just take advantage of the sun and find a few puddles to jump in, flowers to pick and a butterfly to chase. Just open up my eyes and see the world in a different light and point of view.

PS: For a certain someone who may be interested – The four steps to Sainthood: servant of god, venerable, blessed and finally Saint …

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