The familiar window glimpsed from outside gives your own home a stranger’s perspective.

Seeing your own lit window from the street briefly puts you outside your life. The room you know from the inside becomes a scene, warm and small and slightly unfamiliar, and for a moment you get what a passer-by gets rather than what you usually notice. Distance turns the ordinary into something observed.

Walk home the long way one evening and look at the house from across the road before going in. Ask what somebody would think of the life visible through that window. It is a cheap way of noticing what you already have.