“If I don’t get outside soon, I’m going to go mad.”

Why time in nature is one of our most precious possessions.

It was the afternoon of a long day working from home — laptop out, slippers on, sitting at the dining table. Sometimes it feels like these days of working indoors, staring at a computer screen for hours on end, are an inescapable reality of modern life. A regrettable, but inevitable result of the increasing digitisation of our lives, where your roaming area is confined exclusively to wherever has good wi-fi.

I felt depressed, overwhelmed & unmotivated. Even the sea-view through the window made no difference - it looked so close but felt so far away. The waves were photons hitting my eyes, but making no difference to my heart. Something needed to be done. And I knew deep down that I only needed to do one thing — get outside.

As soon as the fresh air hits your skin you know you’ve made the right call. The one pervading feeling I get whenever I’m in the outdoors is one of space. Infinite space all around me, stretching out to the horizon. Space to think.

Space to breathe.

The tension you’ve been unconsciously carrying around all day just falls away and you exhale properly for the first time. You realise that you really needed this — more than you thought.

The idea that getting out in nature is good for you is hardly a new one. From Henry David Thoreau sitting by Walden Pond to John Muir hiking through the Sierra Nevada mountains, there is no shortage of inspirational writing about the benefits of a life lived in nature. But, more recently, the idea that the natural world can act as a kind of therapy for some of the ills of modern life has begun to emerge. From Howard Clinebell’s 1996 book Ecotherapy: Healing Ourselves, Healing the Earth, to the plethora of books and studies that have followed, a few things have become clear.

Researchers have found that spending time in nature helps to reduce rumination (focusing on negative thoughts for extended periods of time). Another study found that while on a hiking excursion a group increased their performance on a problem-solving task by 50% [if you want to take your team on an outdoor hike full of focused, creative, flowing conversations check out the Walkshops organised by our friends at Unknown Epic].

Ultimately though, the biggest thing nature can give us is the sense of something greater than ourselves. Confronted with the vastness of nature our egocentricity fades away, we stop focusing so much on the narrative of our lives - in which we are always the central and most important character. We start to realise that maybe all the little things we spend so much time and energy worrying about don’t really matter that much in the end. We open our eyes and ears to the world around us, and we start to hear the soft murmurings of the Earth, and the faint but constant whisper on the wind that reminds us…

“Everything is OK.”

INHERITED is a tri-annual independent magazine on a mission to help our readers cultivate a radically spiritual connection to Mother Earth.

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