Natural Timing
TAoN No. 214: The 15-minute challenge at the heart of a new book on the value of the outdoors. Plus a 30% off sale, and more.
* Reminder: The Savor of the Month theme for July is DOORS. Details here; chat thread here. Currently you have to be a Supporter to contribute to the thread because I was getting too much spammy stuff, but I may open it up again later.
“The nature we put into our days is, of course, the amount of nature in our lives.”
Longtime TAoN readers will recall Alastair Humphreys, a veteran writer and adventurer who has become an expert on finding the remarkable in the local. (I wrote about that back in issue 95.) He’s particularly insightful and inspiring on the natural world, so I was excited to hear about his latest book, Unwilded. Alastair writes:
Unwilded is a book about learning to notice the world again and finding our way back to nature. It argues that our constant digital connection has dulled our engagement with the natural world – and that this disconnection is harming not only the planet, but our own wellbeing too. We have become unwilded, and urgently need a simple, slow, offline reconnection with nature. ….
My bold claim is that spending just fifteen minutes outdoors each day, paying attention and beginning to care, can be the first stepping stone towards repairing both ourselves and the living world. It might involve climbing a tree once a month, taking your coffee outside, making pinhole cameras from beer cans collected on litter picks, rewilding your garden, joining parkrun, or simply moving your next Zoom meeting outdoors. This is accessible outdoors time for anyone and everyone.
Obviously I love the very concrete prompt to spend 15 minutes a day outside. And however much time you find yourself outside, I suspect we can all relate to this passage from the book: “We’re too busy for nature today. We’ve got work to do and kids to feed and an infinite algorithm to scroll through,” Alastair writes. “But that is OK, as today is just one day and nature will still be there for us tomorrow. Until it isn’t. The nature we put into our days is, of course, the amount of nature in our lives.”
With that in mind, I asked Alastair if he would answer a couple of questions for TAoN.
Q: Is 15 minutes daily better than hour or two on the weekend?
Alastair Humphreys: “Spending 15 minutes, or five minutes, or even one minute, paying really close attention to your nearest bit of nature is very different from getting out for an hour or two at the weekend. The best way I can show this is that I feel the four years I spent living in nature, riding around the world and sleeping in a tent every night, revealed less about the miracles of the wild universe than my relatively newfound fascination with nearby nature and everyday wildness, which I’ve been working hard to develop over the last few years.
“There is a very strong argument that if your modern 21st-century life is too busy to spend 15 minutes outside every day, then you probably need to spend 30 minutes outside every day... Leaving that aside, though, I think that spending even one minute looking carefully at a tree every lunchtime offers a different type of benefit from an hour or two hiking at the weekend.”
Q: Do you have any how-to-start advice for someone who can’t quite envision how to get going — can’t picture what they’ll do with those 15 minutes?
A: “Take a photograph of a tree every week for a year. The only way this will realistically work is if there is a tree you see regularly enough to make it part of your routine. For example, I scheduled a reminder every Thursday morning at 9 a.m. to photograph a tree. I put it into my Google Calendar exactly as I would a Zoom meeting.
“After just a few weeks, this tiny action became something I looked forward to. By the end of the year, it had shown me clearly what a wild gallop our little planet makes around the sun over the course of a year. The miracle of the universe was revealed to me through the changes you notice when you do something as small as snap a photo on your phone once a week.”
Thank you, Alastair, and congrats and bravo on Unwilded!
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OKAY THAT’S IT!
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And thanks for reading …
rw
All this by Rob Walker (unless otherwise noted) PO Box 171, 748 Mehle St., Arabi LA 70032.
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