No Easter Egg Hunting Today

Funny thing is…

most people switch off the moment life gets comfortable.

They ease into it without even noticing. Routine takes over. Awareness fades. The world becomes predictable, safe, manageable. There’s nothing wrong with that—it’s human nature. Comfort is something people work hard for.

But where I worked, comfort wasn’t part of the equation.

There were no soft edges to life. No moments where you could afford to drift off, even briefly. Every step, every sound, every ripple in the water carried meaning. And sometimes, that meaning came with consequences.

Serious ones.

So you learned quickly—or you didn’t last long.

Today, I found myself walking beneath Leake Street Tunnel in London. A world away from the rivers and villages where I spent years working. No crocodiles here. No silent water hiding something just beneath the surface. Just concrete, graffiti, the hum of trains above, and people moving through their day without a second thought.

And yet…

nothing really changes.

I still catch myself reading everything.

Movement. Shadows. Space.

The way someone shifts their weight. The way a group forms or breaks apart. The way light falls into dark corners. Even the rhythm of footsteps echoing off the walls—there’s a pattern to it, whether people realise it or not.

It’s not something I switch on.

It’s something that never switched off.

When you’ve lived in environments where hesitation has consequences, awareness becomes something deeper than a skill. It becomes instinct. It embeds itself into how you see the world.

Back there, on the riverbanks, awareness wasn’t optional—it was survival.

You didn’t just look at the water. You read it. You learned to notice the smallest disturbances. A slight change in current. A shadow that shouldn’t be there. The unnatural stillness that often meant something was watching.

And it wasn’t just the water.

You read people too. Villagers who had lived under that same fear for years. You could see it in their eyes before a word was spoken. The way they approached the river. The hesitation. The way conversations would drop when the subject turned to what was taking lives from their community.

Fear leaves a mark.

Not always loud or obvious—but it’s there.

I remember arriving in places where that fear had settled deep into daily life. Where something as simple as collecting water or washing clothes became a calculated risk. Where children were kept back from the river, not out of caution, but out of necessity.

And standing there, you felt it.

Not just their fear—but the weight of it.

Responsibility has a way of sharpening your senses.

Because you know what’s at stake.

And if I’m honest… there were moments where I felt it too.

Not panic. Not hesitation.

But a very real awareness that things could go wrong.

That’s something people often misunderstand. They think fear disappears in those environments. It doesn’t. It changes. It becomes controlled. Focused. Channelled into awareness rather than reaction.

You don’t ignore it.

You use it.

And that’s where instinct is forged.

Not in comfort—but in consequence.

So walking through a place like Leake Street Tunnel now, years later, I find that same instinct quietly working in the background. There’s no danger here. No hidden predator beneath the surface.

But the mind doesn’t forget where it was trained.

It still reads.

It still observes.

It still calculates.

Most people will never experience that—and that’s not a criticism. It’s just a different path. A different life. Most people are never placed in situations where their awareness becomes the line between life and death.

They don’t need to be.

But once you’ve lived that way… it stays with you.

You don’t return to switching off.

You don’t go back to moving through the world without noticing the details.

Because those details once mattered too much.

And perhaps, in a different way, they still do.

What’s interesting is how that awareness translates into completely different environments. From African riverbanks to the heart of London—different ground, different risks, different realities.

But the instinct remains the same.

Awareness isn’t tied to location.

It’s tied to experience.

To what you’ve seen.

To what you’ve faced.

To what you know can happen when things are overlooked.

So while people were out today, enjoying Easter, searching for eggs, switching off for a while…

I found myself walking through a tunnel of colour and noise, still quietly reading the world around me.

Not out of necessity anymore.

But because that part of me never left.

And never will.

Different ground.

Same instinct.