Eva Bradley: Listening out for falling trees

Eva Bradley

People have often wondered whether a tree falling in the forest with no one to hear it makes a sound. As far as I know the answer to this riddle continues to be elusive.

But in my own life I have solved a similar mystery; what goes on in the world when I'm not in it.

For about a decade, I have spent most of my waking hours secreted away in the shady recesses of a photographic studio beavering away on Photoshop and various other computer programmes.

Summers have slid past behind closed curtains and friends and family have turned tanned and tossed salads in my absence. We are all inclined to put ourselves at the centre of our own universe, so it became easy to wonder if a world outside the office really existed if I was not there to share in it.

But for the past few months I have emerged into the bright, sparkling world of daytime leisure, eyes blinking at the shock of so much sunlight, suddenly a diurnal creature pushing a pram and flitting about to various baby-related activities and appointments during a time of day when I was once seldom seen.

And to my immense surprise, it turns out there was a whole wide world happening between 9-5pm quite unlike any I'd ever known before.

For a start there were prams everywhere I looked (although this could simply be that I was noticing them now in the same way a particular model of car will suddenly appear at every set of lights as soon as you decide to buy one).

While men in suits (or the provincial New Zealand equivalent of them) dominated the footpaths of the CBD, outside that quadrant, the leafier neighbourhoods and suburban cafes were littered with mothers and children under five, elderly people on mobility scooters and bleary-eyed shift workers.

Supermarket car parks that I'd only ever seen full on my way home from work were empty during the daytime and inside the lonely sound of a single barcode scanner beeping was a novelty.

Roads that had always ferried busy streams of traffic whenever I was on them during peak hours were now only a tumbleweed short of looking positively abandoned.

I was amazed how quickly I slotted into this new world and forgot about the slow march of the working week being endured by so many others.

It was like slipping into a parallel universe, an imaginary world where everything was quieter, slower and frankly, nicer.

It goes without saying that a life like that is too good to be true. Before I knew it my 14-week government-sponsored break from reality had expired and it was time to re-enter the slip-stream of the working week.

After enjoying my shiny new life outside the office so much, I worried this would be depressing. But it really is true that change is as good as a holiday. The first day I walked back into my studio, turned on the computer and shut the curtains I was excited to be using my brain again and focused on more than the minute-by-minute demands of a small baby.

Now thanks to the dedication of two wonderful grandmothers and a baby daddy who has very sweetly offered to "babysit" his own child on Saturdays, I have one foot in two very different worlds for half a week each.

Although juggling life as a working mother is a steep and exhausting learning curve, I can confidently say now that if a tree falls in either of my worlds at any time, I will probably hear it.

-Eva Bradley is an award-winning journalist