Our first meeting as Walk Leaders

By Evita Paraskevi

I was very excited to participate in the Mindful Walking Project and I couldn’t wait for

the day to start. Overall, it was a very interesting and positive day: we introduced

ourselves, met new people and started exploring the topic of the project. I believe we

only scratched the surface because everything was new and different, really interesting

but different. My personal challenge was to actually grasp properly the idea and

understand the purpose of our walks. After a year of being a postgraduate student and

interacting with people from different disciplines, for example: anthropologists, I still

struggle a bit to see the world in a more abstract way and be creative in very different

and more disorganised ways. And I don’t mean disorganised in a bad way. All I am

trying to say is that when you are used to working in very organised environments and

do things in a specific way it is very difficult (but I love it) to actually work in a more

relaxed, not that fixed way. After all, we are trying to create a new methodology here so

we are all on the same boat.

So I decided to go with the flow. After a 2 hour discussion and presentations we went for lunch at the Calthorpe Community Garden. It was a beautiful day and being at the garden it didn’t feel like I was in London. We stayed barefoot in the garden and that was my favourite part of the day. It really reminded me of Greece…if only there was sea around! The sun, the Brazilian children playing basketball nearby and listening to beautiful Latin music, us being barefoot, eating under the gazebo and having that communal, Mediterranean way of eating (you know: sharing plates on the table and we all grab food from everywhere)…. all I could listen in my head was the sea and all I could feel on my feet was the sand at the beach… And then I realised…I am at the Calthorpe Community Garden in LONDON.

Sorry…back to reality. After lunch, we went back to our meeting room to carry on our

discussion, think how we could promote our project and set tasks for the next meeting.

The weird thing for me was that after lunch all I could think of was how much I don’t like wearing shoes and I am a huge shoe fan!

This blog post was written by Evita Paraskevi. Evita is one of the Walk Leaders and will guide a walk in July and August exploring the themes wellbeing and damage.