YESTERDAY’S OUTING ON FOOT – a run/hike/stand-and-stare outing – was so much more rejuvenating than one might think such a short outing could possibly be. I was out for less than three hours, nothing compared with the multi-month trips I used to take, but afterwards I felt as though I’d been away for longer. For far longer. I felt ‘almost’ young again, a rather good feeling for a middle-aged man, as you might guess!
There are many reasons for it: the chemical boost moderate exercise brings, the psychological boost a change of scenery can deliver, the myriad ways nature touches us and that we are hard-wired to respond to, and many other reasons besides. After the outing, I found myself dwelling on a specific reason, the ‘Stepping Back’ reason as I think of it – the stepping back into what we as a species evolved to be, and what twenty-first century life often stops us from being.
Few of us (I think it’s fair to say) can fully escape the demands of twenty-first century life. I’m no exception. No matter how deliberately I make my choices – and I really do try to be deliberate about them – the routines, demands, commitments, and responsibilities of modern living still dominate my days. To be clear, I’m not complaining, or saying the demands are all bad. Many of them add to life, provide purpose and interest, bring their own unique rewards. Some are a privilege, such as being needed by other people. Many of them are complications ‘by choice’. Life would be poorer without these complications, even though many of them are often… well… bloody complicated and take up a significant amount of time!
That’s one of the realities: the time modern life takes up. For me, ‘day job’ work commitments often keep me from doing the work I most want to do. Even more so, personal commitments frequently keep me from attending to my own personal needs, especially my need for stepping back into what I know I really am.
But that’s why I make getting into nature a priority. That’s why I worked hard to create a daily nature habit and why I continue to do my best to maintain it. Even though I sometimes only manage a few minutes, these few minutes are still worth carving out. They always make a difference. Time in nature seldom fails to do what I need it to do. In fact, I can’t recall that last time it didn’t do what I need it to do! Nature, for me, provides simplicity, balance, perspective, awe. It soothes and renews. It inspires. It brings joy. It touches the parts of being fully human that twenty-first century life cannot. It keeps me whole. It heals. Okay sure, it can’t heal everything, but at the very least it alleviates a great many symptoms that modern life causes.
And sometimes it can do so much more. It can wipe away the symptoms completely. As it did during yesterday’s outing during a period that has been more than averagely complicated.
The day, May 6, delivered what most of the past winter didn’t: a great heaping pile of heavy wet snow. It began as rain the day before, turned to snow mid-afternoon, fell all night, and was still falling come dawn. Responsibilities meant I wasn’t free to get out into the storm until much of the morning had passed, by when finally the time came I didn’t hesitate. Running shoes and warm clothes were quickly donned, my camera grabbed, and away into the foothills I trotted.
The outing that followed took me far from modern life’s pressing needs. Soon I was drifting through a snow-shrouded wonderland, a hushed place of soft, exquisite and fleeting beauty. Despite the fact that I was supposedly ‘running’, I moved unhurriedly and paused regularly, and was soon oblivious to everything left behind; was soon cherishing the gift of snow, the gift of moisture, the gift of life. The location wasn’t a wilderness forest. But it might as well have been. There was no sign in it of twenty-first century life. It could have been a forest from 100 years ago, or 1,000 years, or from even longer. And that – perhaps most of all – was why it had such power. That’s why natural places are so important. It’s why keeping them as natural and as wild as possible matters so much. Because nature as it’s meant to be and as it evolved to be can take us back to what we evolved to be. To what we are.
Alone in the forest, engaging with it with my senses, instincts and emotions, consumed by what they found and stirred, I was transported back to an older way of being, and in some ways a fuller way. The forest I’d stepped into met a whole host of deep-rooted long-evolved human needs. It let me, a twenty-first century human living a twenty-first century life, spend a little time where the century could have been any century – in fact, where the century didn’t matter at all.
And, damn, being back there felt good!
