Recently all of my children have been living in different cities. None of them particularly enjoy this - as some of you remember, their childhood home with my Pilates studio was up a hill beside a farm, a world away from the busy and bustling streets of Dublin. One of them recently told me about a realisation she had though, which I thought was a helpful way of looking at things.

Since she had moved to the city, she had been trying to get outside into green space as much as possible, to make up for the lack of countryside. She had been walking through parks, strolling by the canal, and taking her lunch break on a bench under trees. But none of it was enough. Wherever you go in big city parks you can still feel the presence of buildings surrounding you, still hear the traffic, and you still have to fight your way through crowds of people wherever you’re trying to go. The green spaces in the city were never going to be enough, she realised, and when comparing them to life back home they were always going to come up short.

So she shifted her perspective. Instead of trying to replace what she had lost with a poor substitute, she asked herself what benefits a city could bring that the countryside didn’t have. She made a list of museums, galleries and tourist hotspots to visit – after all, tourists visit cities for a reason. By their nature, every city has a wealth of fun free things to do, and so she started making the most of them.

She still goes for walks in the park, but now instead of thinking about how much worse these are than hill walks back home, she tries to consider them just an addition to the other great things the city has to offer. It seems a bit contrived but it shows how much of an impact consciously changing your perspective can have. Or as her grandmother would have said, sometimes you just have to make the best of it.