How to be somewhere.
We've let go of the childish inquisitiveness that connects us with the natural world, and it's a missed opportunity open to all of us.
In a walking session with a client, I’m stepping through a scattering of sycamore samaras and wondering about the last time I picked one up, flung it toward the sky, and watched it spin to the ground like a helicopter.
‘Do kids still pick these up and throw them into the air?’ I ask, pointing to the ground. ‘Whenever I see them, I have the urge to.’
‘Go on then,’ my client says.
I’ve been thinking recently about what Ray Oldenburg termed as ‘third places’, the spaces in which we used to meet informally, forge friendships, finding soothing and nurture in activities and relationships beyond those we have at home or work.
It’s undeniable that libraries, youth clubs, and community centres are on the decline, but it isn’t only infrastructure we’ve lost touch with, it’s also our ability to make use of the spaces that still exist, what psychologist James Gibson described as ‘affordance’.
Rather than perceiving the world around us as a collection of passive shapes and textures, affordance describes what it is to read the potential in a space, opening our imagination to consider what it might invite us to do.
If a sycamore samara at your feet doesn’t evoke an immediate instinct to toss it high into the air and delight in its gentle return to the ground, it’s probably because the cues that we seized upon when I was a child have been lost to later generations, overpowered by less subtle demands.
On a walk with my mother and some family friends on Hothfield Common when I was a child, the ferns that grew higher than my shoulders on a scorching hot day seemed to invite the notion that I was being pursued by German soldiers as I tried to evade capture.
Over the scorched and cracked earth in that endless summer of 1976, I lost all track of time and orientation, as I clambered through the dense undergrowth, throwing myself behind moss covered logs.
Whilst I did manage to avoid the Gestapo, I also lost my mum and became so panicked and tearful that a dog walker had to help me find her.
An awkward picnic ensued, having scared the living daylights out of my mother and embarrassed myself in front of our friends.
Mulling things over carefully, while sulkily munching a sausage roll and sipping a milky coffee that always tasted like the smell of the flask it had been packed in, I concluded the experience would not dull my enthusiasm for the outdoors, but it did dispel any notion that I might subsequently enjoy a career in the military.
Growing up in the 1970s, the absence of pretty much all forms of tech might appear to have been a sadness but, on reflection, it feels as if it was one of life’s richest gifts.
As children, ‘outside’ was always where we were because being in the house usually meant you were doing your homework, or eating your tea. Even in our modest narrow gardens, we found creative ways to spend time.
A memorable game involved climbing over neighbouring fences and hedges after dusk, trying to avoid being spotted by the residents of the houses, until you lost your nerve and went scrambling back to the safety of home.
One evening, my friend Paul, in his rush to hurtle over next-doors hedge, stood on a rake that was lying on the garden path where Mrs Horton had been preparing the beds for her cabbages. Much to our bewilderment, the handle did not spring up to hit him full in the face, in the way we’d seen in the cartoons. Instead, the prongs went straight through his foot and landed him in hospital.
That which we pay attention to in the natural world can offer rich layers of emotional value arising not only from what we can do in them now, but also from the way they can take us effortlessly into our past. It’s impossible to use the rake in my garden without thinking of Paul and, as he’s no longer with us, it’s a triggered memory cherished with all the more fervour.
On the walk to the woods with the dogs, there are a number of wild cherry trees, the fruit often falling to the ground, apparently ignored by the humans and gobbled greedily by the birds who can barely believe their good fortune.
Whenever they’re heavy with fruit, I’m taken straight back to the top deck of the number 7 bus that went from my town all the way to the coast, a journey I would take every year with David Clark. We’d take with us a big bag of dark red cherries, gobbling up the fleshy fruit and squirting the stones between finger and thumb out through the narrow windows.
Arriving by the sea, we’d find a quiet spot to skim stones, attempting to reach the seemingly elusive eights skips, before retiring to the fish and chip shop where I put sugar on my cod believing it to be salt, and the lid of the vinegar came off bathing us both in a heady ferment that accompanied us all the way home.
But making good use of space in nature is not something restricted to childish games with unfortunate consequences. The skills of affordance never leave you once acquired.
In the park, there was until recently a low bridge across a tributary from the lake that would routinely flood.
Whilst it was always amusing to see the odd commuter trying to circumnavigate it in their smart shoes, or a jogger abandon their trainers and wade through barefoot, the dogs and I would head straight for it whenever there had been an extended period of heavy rainfall. If you want to understand the purity and power of affordance, just spend some time with a dog.
A significant expanse of shallow water has only one use in the eyes of a Labrador, and that is to tear through it at lightning speed, ears back and teeth bared until they, and everyone in the vicinity are thoroughly soaked.
If there is a third place that serves as a counterpoint to the impatience and short-tempered intolerance that so many people experience as a consequence of too much time in front of a screen, the natural environment is surely it.
Who can fail to be cheered by wandering through a park listening to the song of a blackbird?
A study conducted by White et.al in 2019 found that spending just 120 minutes each week in nature correlated directly with good mental health and feelings of wellbeing, regardless of whether that was one or several separate visits. Most people spend significantly more time than this on their phones every day which, according to a peer-reviewed meta-analysis conducted in 2022 by Li et.al, is associated with a statistically significant increased risk of depression across a broad range of demographics.
The benefits of spending time in nature don’t end there.
Attention restoration theory, a concept developed by psychologists Stephen and Rachel Kaplan, posits that urban environments demand a relentless level of our attention. Whether it’s the constant buzz of traffic, the likelihood of sudden unexpected sound, the need to stay alert to potential hazard, or just the perpetual presence of something in direct and peripheral vision, we are so distracted it becomes impossible to switch off.
If you think back to the months of lockdown, the eerie quiet that descended upon town centres was palpable. So much so that, on my way to the opticians one day, I had become so used to wandering around unbothered by the continual absence of traffic, I was nearly hit by a car as I crossed the road while staring up at a goldfinch sitting on a lamppost outside Aldi and wondering why it wasn’t hanging around in the woods with its friends.
In nature, attention is caught by the birds, the wind, the wash of the water, something referred to in attention restoration theory as, ‘soft fascination’. Rather than anything being required of us, we are left to notice what captures our interest without expectation or demand, which in itself becomes restorative and replenishing.
Although space in nature is not strictly what Oldenburg meant when he wrote about third places, the qualities it offers are strikingly similar. Neutrality, accessibility, low cost of entry and freedom from obligation.
Like Oldenburg’s clubs, libraries, and community centres, natural spaces are not valuable to us because of ‘what’ they are but because of the qualities they make available to us. Low threat, low demand, opportunity for passing or deep interest, a sense that this simplicity is somehow enough. This is why sitting in your back garden or, even if you don’t have a garden, staring out of a window at the changing shape and colours of a tree can still be stabilising and emotionally nourishing.
Going through a lengthy and very difficult period of depression earlier in life, I found it routinely impossible to feel settled anywhere, however seemingly comfortable, familiar or supportive the space I happened to be in. The only place in which I felt my anxiety and sadness ease temporarily was outside.
I didn’t walk with any particular intention or toward a specific location, but the environment seemed to know what I needed, providing a magical ability to create a temporary calm that felt otherwise elusive.
A study conducted by Bratman et.al (2015) found that neural activity in the part of the brain activated during rumination, decreased among participants who spent time walking in nature versus those who walked in an urban environment, and they reported that their thoughts remained less obsessively negative afterwards too.
An abiding memory of mine from depression is that of constant rumination. The circular thought process of acknowledging how colourless life feels creates a self fulfilling prophecy stripping any and all motivation to do anything about it. Walking from room to room in a quiet panic, looking for something that might calm an anxious mind, feeling shame and guilt at an inability to feel gratitude and joy in a life that, by all external measures, would have appeared wonderful.
At the time, I didn’t see the importance of the natural world in my recovery. Only later did I realise it has been a stabilising thread running through my whole life.
In addition to my own anecdotal experience, there is plenty of empirical evidence that time spent outside naturally evokes within us positive psychological and emotional responses, regardless of what else is going on inside our heads or the wider periphery. Indeed, I don’t remember so much as a temporary reluctance to walk through the local nature reserve and marvel at the wild geraniums even on the day my dog found some human excrement in the bushes and decided to roll in it. Admittedly, it was an uncomfortable walk home.
When Oldenburg first wrote about the disappearance of third places, his lament encompassed an understanding of how important they are in making community, finding comfort, and how these have been places we go to feel connected without expectation.
So whilst the gradual decline in third place infrastructure is to be mourned, the continued existence of parks, woodlands and other green spaces provides an equal opportunity for us all to benefit. It costs nothing to wade up to your waist in freezing cold water when your young dog, who has just covered herself in a substantial cow pat and hasn’t yet realised she can swim, has misjudged the depth of the stream and needs to be rescued.
In a previous piece, ‘Modern forms of comfort are failing us and autism has the solution,’ I explored the way that simple, traditional rituals relied on through the ages to provide an antidote to stress, appear so often in step with the seasons.
In our green spaces, the same is true. There is no need for supervision, for rules, or formal organisation. It costs nothing to gather a bag of elderberries, take them home and make them into cordial, but you’d have to know they were there in the first place. Although, if you do gather elderberries to make a tasty drink, make sure you burp the bottles regularly enough while they ferment, or you may find that you too nearly blow your head off when one of the poppers explodes and goes straight through the kitchen ceiling and you’re left to discard the other unopened bottle as if it were an unexploded bomb (which it essentially is).
So, whilst I’m not advocating that wild foraging is for everyone, the unmediated experience we’re invited to in nature is a counterpoint to the reliance we’ve developed on structured, repetitive and algorithm controlled leisure, which doesn’t appear to be making us happy or feel less lonely.
It’s unlikely that a game of conkers will come back into fashion, but it’s important to acknowledge that reconnecting with a valuable route towards good mental health doesn’t need to cost anything apart from time. What prevents us from getting the best of our environment is attention, inquisitiveness, and imagination.
At the heart of regaining our stabilising heritage is perhaps not only the loss of the habit, but also a self-consciousness that would categorise this type of engagement as outdated or childish. In fact, it’s neither. It has its roots in a tradition of what works to soothe an increasingly agitated nervous system, it’s psychologically sound, and always available.
Invited to stop and launch a samara into the blue sky by my client, I demurred. We were there for her and it felt wrong making a space for my own nostalgic self-indulgence.
Taking a few steps forward, I turned to see her picking one up and tossing it skyward, delighted at its reliable rotation back towards the ground, an eternally repeatable response, itself a reminder of the stabilising circularity of the natural world.
This week on ‘Sideways’ podcast, we’re discussing ‘social loafing’, the practice of taking your foot off the gas when you think nobody will notice.
If that’s not enough of a draw, we also hear about a man putting a WW1 explosive into his rectum, discuss strange eating habits, and wonder where the practice of remixing hymns came from.
That’s all for this week.
Thanks for being here, I appreciate you.