2025 brought lots of newness into our life. One of which was moving into our new home, in a new area of London, and adopting a fully suburban life.
The landscape of this area is characteristically hilly, and there are leafy residential roads all around. Our house is located near the top of one of the hills, and the drive home overlooks a valley full of oaks & beeches, dotted with many good-looking houses that have generous rear gardens and deep driveways. We often go down a slope and climb up another just to meet local friends! The views from upper-floor windows of most houses must be spectacular no matter the direction. Naturally, it’s been a big change from what we were used to seeing around us for over two decades – tall apartment buildings, taller offices, hustle-bustle of people, noise of cars & sirens, and just the busyness of a city life. And to suddenly have birds chirp at me in the mornings, squirrels come in to say hello or have a neighbourhood fox visit our garden – it’s a huge visual adjustment that we hadn’t fully anticipated, honestly!
That said, the biggest change of the past year has been to get our son to start nursery. And this adjustment was an emotional rollercoaster. The timing of it couldn’t have been any more challenging and overwhelming. We got him to start roughly two weeks after we moved in to the new place. It is heartbreaking no matter the age they start nursery at, and no amount of preparation can stop the tears on day 1 (or 2 or 3…).
Well, it was tough I won’t lie. I will borrow the famous words of Michael Rosen (author of the book We Are Going on a Bear Hunt): “We can’t go over it. We can’t go under it. Oh no! We’ve got to go through it!” to say, we have somewhat got through the tough part, I think. Maybe.
A part of the whole nursery drop-off / pick-up experience was (still is) doing the up-down on the slopes around here. His nursery is located down the hill from us; most times it’s a car ride doing the work but sometimes it is a walk too. It’s a steep gradient for a kid to walk, and so far he’s shown no qualms about it – he enjoys the slow walk every few days, notices the new flowers and changing colours of leaves on the way, picks up small stones for his ongoing collection and mostly talks about which route he’d prefer to take on his way back (because let’s be honest, coming back home is the most exciting part about going to nursery after all).
And so, besides the visual and emotional adjustments, there was this aspect of a physical adjustment with this new place. The walk to-fro train station is roughly 18mins now, along a slope-y road; the nursery-runs offer a good cardio on a 15-degree incline every few days; and of course the visits to the parks & huge playgrounds add to the joy of movement with an active 3yo in tow.
All of this brings me to a conversation with Amma, one evening, when I was discussing (ok, sighing!) about how this new life is so new in so many ways. And she was rather surprised when I explained all of the above towards what I meant by “new”. She smiled, and said, to the contrary, all this reminded her entirely of how and where I spent the first few years of my life!
And just like that, scenes from my childhood played slowly in front of my eyes like a film on a reel.
We lived in this little township in the interiors of an eastern state in India. The place sat in the lap of the dense & hilly Saranda Forest that covers the regional belt, rich in iron ore and other minerals. Our surroundings were made up of tall Sal trees, and others like Mahua and Jamun. I used to cross a hillock to go school every day, because taking the ‘pukka’ road meant a longer but boring walk. Going up and down the township slopes was how we kids played, in fact it was how we went anywhere at all – be it to the shops or friends’ homes. Elephants were a common sighting given the jungles were near by, but foxes at night were a common, albeit scary, sight too!
With a sudden rush of emotions, I realised all this newness around me had been washed over with paints of utter nostalgia! I was also marvelling at my own forgetfulness of how I never put this together myself. I should have seen the similarities. I lived in those hills once as a carefree kid, and now perhaps as a mum I was too close, too occupied, and too lost in my world, scrambling from one day to another, to really see any of it.
It definitely felt like a full circle moment – to be building a life in a little corner of London that resembles a life I led over three decades ago in another part of the world!
So, this is what I want to leave you with – my twopence worth: sometimes we need to zoom out a little to be able to make sense of the patterns (we are making) that are impossible to see when we’re standing too close. And the process might bring what truly matters back into focus: that life is often less about finding new answers and more about rediscovering the ones we’ve been carrying with us all along.
The152Girl 