Distraction Therapy – Solstice and Urban Renewal
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The Winter Solstice arrives quietly in the city. There is no open horizon, no wide moorland sky, yet the turning is no less real. It moves through streetlights and shuttered shops, through late buses and lit windows, through the hum that never fully subsides. Even here, the year reaches its inward point.
In urban spaces, darkness is layered. It gathers between buildings, pools in underpasses, settles into routines worn smooth by repetition. The night is rarely silent, but it can still be listened to. Sirens fade. Footsteps pass. Somewhere, a radio murmurs behind a wall. These fragments form a different kind of landscape, one shaped by proximity rather than distance.
Spiritual renewal in the modern environment does not arrive as escape. It emerges through attention. It asks what it means to pause within systems designed for constant motion. At the solstice, the city invites a subtler practice: to notice thresholds, to recognise the inward turn even amid brightness and speed.
Distraction Therapy inhabits this urban interior. It treats sound as a means of reorientation, a way of tuning into quieter registers beneath the noise. Radio becomes a companion to reflection, offering moments where imagination can breathe within the built world rather than flee from it.
As the light begins its slow return, the solstice reminds us that renewal does not require wilderness. It begins wherever listening is possible, even in the heart of the city.
