This morning I was walking with my headphones on, as I almost always do. Invisible — Piano Version by NTO started playing. NTO is one of my favourite producers, and almost immediately I felt the music take over my body. I don’t really know how else to describe it. For a few seconds, I wasn’t just listening to it. I felt completely inside it, as if my body and the music had become part of the same thing.

I opened my arms, looked up at the sky and took a deep breath. One of those long, full breaths that somehow feels bigger than breathing. And in that moment, I felt free.

There is something I love doing when I walk: changing the direction of my gaze. I don’t always want to look straight ahead. I look up, to the sides, sometimes behind me. I like discovering different versions of the same route, because I’ve realised that you can walk down the same street a hundred times and somehow never really see the same street twice. Change where you look, and suddenly things that were never part of your journey appear.

But this morning, when I looked up, something felt different. The clouds seemed to be moving with the music. The tops of the trees were swaying underneath them. I could see the upper parts of buildings, windows, roofs, shapes and details that usually exist somewhere above my everyday field of vision. And there was something incredibly poetic about it.

For a moment, everything seemed to belong together. The music, my body, the movement of the clouds, the trees, the buildings, me walking underneath all of it. It was one of those strange little moments when reality hasn’t actually changed, but somehow it feels different. Almost choreographed. Almost as if the world and the music had accidentally synchronised for a few seconds. It felt magical.

Not the kind of magic that requires something extraordinary to happen. Quite the opposite. The magic was precisely in how ordinary everything was. Those clouds would have moved whether I was looking at them or not. Those trees had probably been moving in the wind all morning. Those buildings had been standing there for years. I had simply looked.

And I started thinking about how much of the world becomes invisible simply because we keep looking in the same direction. When we walk, we tend to look ahead. At the pavement. At the traffic lights. At the people coming towards us. At wherever we are trying to get to. And perhaps we do something similar with life. Something happens, a problem appears in front of us, and suddenly it occupies the entire frame. We stare at it so intensely that it begins to feel as if it is everything there is. But everything outside the frame is still there.

The sky hasn’t disappeared. The trees haven’t stopped moving. The strange details at the top of a building are still waiting for someone to notice them. Clouds are travelling above our heads. Leaves are doing incredibly complicated things while we casually call them leaves. Someone designed that window. Someone chose the shape of that roof. Someone planted that tree years before I happened to walk underneath it this morning.

And suddenly I had a thousand questions. Why do those clouds move like that? Who built that building? How old is that tree? What is happening inside those leaves right now? Of course, most of these things have explanations. But knowing that something can be explained doesn’t make it any less extraordinary.

Maybe curiosity is partly this: changing the frame. Looking above instead of ahead. Behind instead of in front. Looking at something everyone passes and asking, wait — what is that?

It’s something I love about art too. A photograph, a painting, a collage: they don’t create the entire world. They choose a frame. They tell you where to look. And perhaps we are doing the same thing all day without realising it, constantly deciding what gets to exist inside our frame and what remains outside it.

This morning the street hadn’t changed. The buildings hadn’t changed. The trees hadn’t changed. Even the clouds would have been moving exactly the same way if I had never looked up.

The only thing that changed was where I was looking. And for the length of one song, an ordinary morning became incredibly beautiful.

Maybe sometimes we don’t need a different world. Maybe we just need to look in a different direction.