Looking for What Was Already There

The fun fair is a community event, and I wanted the scavenger hunt to be something anyone could participate in. No tickets required, no special equipment, nothing to buy. I walked around the schoolyard taking close up photographs of things that were already there. A piece of playground equipment. Part of a sign. A detail on a wall. I made sure the clues reached into every corner of the yard, partly because I wanted the hunt to feel substantial, but also because I knew how much work had gone into everything else happening that day. If the clues led people through the whole space, they might also find the games, activities and small details that other people had spent weeks carefully putting together.

The final version was remarkably simple. A piece of paper filled with cropped photographs of ordinary things. Find the object, collect a letter, keep going. At the end, the letters spelled the school mascot. I bought piles of stickers so everyone who completed it could choose a prize.

People loved it.

Children ran across the yard holding their sheets, studying corners they had probably passed hundreds of times before. Parents joined in. People compared clues and pointed things out to one another. Nothing on the page was new. Nothing had been added to the schoolyard to make the hunt possible. The activity worked because something familiar had been framed differently and people had been given a reason to pay attention.

A close up photograph does something curious. It removes an object from its usual context and asks us to notice its shape, colour or texture before recognizing it as part of something larger. The object itself has not changed. Our attention has.

We are about to be inundated with invitations to make the most of what is left of the year. Finish strong. Get ahead. Set the goals. Build the habits. Prepare now so that January can be the beginning of something better. Then January will arrive with its own set of instructions for becoming a new version of ourselves.

There is an assumption underneath all of this that is worth noticing. That what is here now is somehow insufficient. That there should be more progress, more clarity, more discipline, more to show for the year. That the person standing here, in this particular moment, with everything they already know, carry and are capable of, is not quite enough.

What if we started by looking more closely instead?

Before deciding what needs to be added, changed or corrected, we could pay closer attention to what is already present. The abilities we use so naturally that we barely count them as abilities. The relationships that sustain us. The work that gives us energy. The ideas we return to. The things we have learned, built and practised without ever stopping to consider what they might tell us about ourselves.

It can be difficult to see these things when we are standing in the middle of them. This is one of the things I value about coaching. Another person is paying close attention to the whole picture, and every so often they can hold up one small piece of it. Something you said. A word you used more than once. A shift in your energy. A contradiction, a strength, a pattern you have become so accustomed to that it no longer catches your attention.

They can hold it up and ask, What is this?

Not because they know the answer, or because they have found something that was missing. It was already there. The question simply gives you the opportunity to look at it outside its usual context, to consider why it matters and to decide what, if anything, you want to do with what you now see.

That feels quite different from beginning with the assumption that we need to become someone better. We can want more for ourselves without treating the present version of our lives as inadequate. We can create, change, stretch and move forward from a place of recognition rather than deficiency.

By the end of the fun fair, the schoolyard was exactly as it had been that morning. The signs were in the same places. The playground equipment had not moved. The walls had not changed. But hundreds of people had spent the afternoon looking more closely at what was already there.

There is plenty to begin with.