When I feel like I want to run away from it all, I know the answer is to start walking. If I’m stuck in the city, trying to find the tallest trees in the local park will do the trick, but I know that really I’m craving something wilder: rugged and blustery coastline, dense forest, hills and mountains.
I wasn’t always like this: I am a city girl, my childhood split between Belfast and Singapore. Both very different cities, but with one thing in common: easy access to nature. I grew up knowing that I could escape the city, and my feelings, anytime I needed.
I love living in the city, but I find that the more civilised my city life gets, the more I crave adventures that make me mucky, dusty or weather-beaten. And the more stressful and overstimulated I feel, the more I need a break where I have nothing to do but focus on my natural surroundings.
I’ve learned to listen to myself when I need some wildness in my life. It’s not hard to hear it: my stressed-out soul can easily shriek over the sound of the city. When this happens, I prescribe myself a dose of wilderness. This might simply mean pulling on my hiking boots and tracing the canalways of London. Or it might be a weekend hiking and wild camping in the Scottish Highlands, or the west coast of Ireland. If I’ve learned one thing about living life a bit wilder, in my years as an adventure travel writer, it’s that little pockets of wilderness exist everywhere.
Hiking the British and Irish coastline never fails me, because the sea makes my stressed shoulders slacken the moment I glimpse it. Climbing a mountain or running across trails teaches me to breathe deeply again. Surrounding myself with forest, shielded from anything other than the greens and browns of trees, I can feel my senses resetting after weeks of being overstimulated by screen time. After a spell in nature, I’m returned to civilisation as a healthier and happier creature.
I’m not doing anything new. For centuries, humans have recognised the power of walking in nature for personal and spiritual growth. Christian and Muslim pilgrimages date back to the fourth century, and by the 18th century, wilderness walking was being undertaken for creative, artistic and personal reasons. The English Romantic poets Wordsworth, Coleridge and Shelley recognised the redemptive, healing powers of the natural world, pioneers of a “back to nature” creative mentality. Walking and writing have always had an intimate relationship, because walking is inspiration, walking is observation, and walking is a healing process.
On my long hikes through Ireland, Britain and beyond, I find myself thinking of the works of University of Michigan environmental psychologists Rachel and Stephen Kaplan, who distinguish between two forms of attention: “directed attention” – the forced concentration of our working day – versus “fascination”. They argue that using too much of the former leads to “directed attention fatigue” and the impulsivity, distractibility and irritability that accompany it. The remedy, however, is simple – spending time in nature, where we find our brains engaged automatically by our beautiful surroundings. “If you can find an environment where the attention is automatic, you allow directed attention to rest,” wrote Stephen. “And that means an environment that’s strong on fascination.”
This fascination is what I seek out: the sort of natural scenery that is so captivating that I have no choice but to focus on it, and only it. Hiking is one way I get myself into this meditative state, but in Britain and Ireland, we aren’t short of ways to be wild.
When I throw myself into cold water, be it a lake, river or the Atlantic Ocean, I have no choice but to focus on the stuff that matters. I find a similar focus above the water, sailing or paddleboarding. I am a self-taught paddleboarder, starting out armed with just one tip from a friend. “Look at the horizon,” she shouted at me, as I lugged my new paddleboard towards the sea. “If you look down you fall in.” This was the only tip I needed to have a successful first paddle – it was also the tip I needed to have a meditative first paddle. Other thoughts slipped away, as I forced myself to not look down or fret about immediate potential hazards. Instead, I focused on nothing but the mid-distance, where I was going, steadily and surely.
Stargazing, too, works magic on my stressed-out soul. The very first time I tried sleeping under the stars, on a beach on the west coast of Ireland, I was scared I’d never be able to fall asleep, that I’d feel vulnerable and exposed. But staring up at the sky, my anxieties dissipated, each worry put in its place by the vastness of the universe. It struck me that this is how humans are supposed to fall asleep: with a nightly reminder that much of our inner turmoil is absolutely inconsequential.
Of course we’re drawn to nature for the beauty we see: crashing waves, rugged coastline, sweeping mountains, ancient forests and wildflower-strewn meadows. But we’re also drawn to nature for what it removes from view. Any time I need perspective, I know where to find it: in the sky, the sea, the forest.
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