In the end of January this year, I decided that for the whole month of February I will take photos every day. Not random photos, but photos of the same route I walk every day. I really live in one of the most uneventful places possible, and especially the route I walk is pretty plain, passing by flats, a huge parking lot (where I found the heart balloon) and the Shell offices. But the commitment to keep taking photos, even though not a recipe for some amazing photographic project, proved to be a way of paying attention, searching and finding something new and something beautiful in the routine the mind normally ignores. These are some of the photos I took.

I wasn’t planning to show these to anyone. But then I thought that this is not so much about the photos themselves. It’s more about my experience of walking half asleep, in the cold, in the very morning, and searching for the small details and for something new. The temptation is to cancel off our attention and get through the routine walks, instead of sinking in and paying attention. Our minds tend to disconnect until they find something ‘worth paying attention to’. And the common perception is that something that’s worth it, something surprising and beautiful, well, they cannot be found in the parking lot in between home and the bus stop. But is that true?

A small detail is that I couldn’t take as much time as I wanted to take photos. As you might notice, the photos are either taken in the morning, or in the late evening, when I walked to my office or back.