Reserved by Nature - a blog about self-actualisation

Episode 1 - Walks in Nature

Since emigrating to Australia, I’ve renewed an old love of walking in nature. I know it’s a love because that feeling has been in me since childhood. Walking the neighbour’s dogs through conker scattered woodland tracks in rural Cambridgeshire on damp autumn Sundays. Lugging horrendously heavy rucksacks up Scafell Pike with school mates on Duke of Edinburgh’s Award hikes. And much more recently, brisk walks round a loop trail hugging a rainforest covered escarpment in Dorrigo National Park.

It’s the loop in the walk that I enjoy most. The comfort of repetition and the guaranteed destination. I set my stopwatch at the start and check the temperature. As recently as October, it was 23C at home by the coast and 10C at the trail head. The forest closes in on you immediately after leaving the carpark and sucks you into another world, leaving cars, artifice and for the most part, other people behind. The meditation begins.

There are several benefits to walking the same track on a regular basis.

Superficially, one notices the signs of on-going track maintenance through changes, sometimes quite stark, such as the sawing of fallen tree trunks or the installation of safety railing. More subtle, seasonal changes are felt, smelled or heard, often without consciously knowing what’s changed, just that it has.

Internally, the circular format of the walk mirrors my thought patterns. At the outset, I intentionally let go of immediate concerns. External forces, deadlines and filters fade away and I sink into mental silence. I walk at pace, working the heat and heart rate up to a plateau. Then the imagination’s spark plugs fire up. What happens next is akin to dreaming: thoughts with no previous association can suddenly collide and form new meanings. Revisiting familiar themes in this manner brings up new connections and possibilities.

Viewed as a component of a mental health care regime, it’s the opposite of having what’s referred to in psychiatry as automatic negative thoughts - those negative conclusions we often draw out of habit and which you need to train yourself out of to avoid falling into patterns of self-doubt or depression. In this environment, my mind fizzes with automatic creative thoughts.

Walking in nature is just the tonic my brain needs whenever I’m in a rut. How does the rainforest achieve this? Well for one, at a cellular level we’re made of similar stuff to rainforests and I reckon our thought patterns have a lot in common with fungal networks - another of the universe’s marvelous organisms that predates humans by millions of years - that connect every part of the rainforest. Is my sensory communion with the rainforest perhaps a way of plugging into an ancient network that my human cells instantly recognise and find invigorating?

My heart likes to think so. And my walking brain agrees.