Our daughter is training to be a life coach. She recently told me about an exercise in mindfulness that was part of one lesson.

She said that they were to go for a walk and focus on just one colour to see how many things they would notice in that colour. She chose purple and was surprised by how much purple there was around her that she had never noticed before.

I decided to give this a go. On my morning walk on September 25, I decided to focus on pink. When all of the leaves were busy turning yellow, red, and gold, and when the grass was starting to fade to a dull brown, how much pink could there possibly be?

From still blooming cultivated annual flowers, to the tiniest weed leaves alongside the trail, pink seemed to be everywhere!

As I thought about being mindful of the present, I realized that I do this without conscious effort when I’m walking. I’m always looking for something interesting to photograph, so I am definitely tuned in to my environment and fully living in the moment. When I’m not out walking, I tend to be quite focused on the past or the future for much of my day. I’m going to find a way to apply the exercise in daily life.

“You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this.”

Henry David Thoreau