Notes on a Nervous Planet(43)

When looking at the sky, all our 21st-century worries can be placed in their cosmic context. The sky is bigger than emails and deadlines and mortgages and internet trolls. It is bigger than our minds, and their illnesses. It is bigger than names and nations and dates and clocks. All of our earthly concerns are quite transient when compared to the sky. Through our lives, throughout every chapter of human history, the sky has always been the sky.

And, of course, when we are looking at the sky we aren’t looking at something outside ourselves. We are looking, really, at where we came from. As physicist Carl Sagan wrote in his masterpiece Cosmos: ‘The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.’

The sky, like the sea, can anchor us. It says: hey, it’s okay, there is something bigger than your life that you are part of, and it’s – literally – cosmic. It’s the most wonderful thing. And you need to make like a tree or a bird and just feel a part of the great natural order now and again. You are incredible. You are nothing and everything. You are a single moment and all eternity. You are the universe in motion.

Well done.





Nature

THE SKY HAS been shown to soothe us.

In 2018 a research study conducted by King’s College London found that being able to see the sky helps our mental health. And not just the sky. Seeing trees, hearing birdsong, being outside, and feeling in contact with nature.

Participants in the study went out into the world, and were instructed to record their mental states at different locations. Interestingly, the study was quite nuanced as it factored in each individual’s risk of developing poor mental health by doing some early tests on each participant to assess impulsive behaviours.

The study, catchily titled ‘Urban Mind: Using Smartphone Technologies to Investigate the Impact of Nature on Mental Wellbeing in Real Time’, found that while being out in the natural world is good for everyone, it is of particular benefit for those who are more predisposed to mental health problems like addiction, ADHD, antisocial personality disorder and bipolar disorder.

‘Short-term exposure to nature has a measurable beneficial impact on mental wellbeing,’ concluded Dr Andrea Mechelli, who had helped to lead the research.

Ecotherapy or ‘green care’ projects are on the rise. Many city farms and community gardens are now used for mental health work to lower stress, anxiety and depression. Of course, in many ways this is all acting on old advice: ‘Get yourself some fresh air.’ In 1859, in her Notes on Nursing, Florence Nightingale wrote that ‘after a closed room, what hurts them [patients] most is a dark room’ and advised that ‘it is not only light but direct sunlight they want’. Finally, evidence is catching up.

The trouble is, over half the world’s population now live in big cities. In 1950 more than two-thirds of the world’s population lived in rural settlements. Now, worldwide, most people live in urban areas. And, as people spend more time indoors than ever before, it’s clear that we aren’t existing much amid forests and under natural skies.

It’s time we started being more aware that the blues and greens of nature can help us. And the lives of children, too. More fresh air, more direct sunlight, maybe even if we are lucky the odd walk across fields and through forests. And perhaps also, armed with evidence, we can help to make the communal urban spaces we inhabit a bit more green and pleasant, too, so that everyone can benefit from nature, not just the lucky few.





The world inside

SO, YES, THE beauty of nature can heal. But in Ibiza, in 1999, I stood on top of a cliff near the villa where I was living, tucked into one of the quieter corners on the east of the island, and urged myself to jump.

I literally had no way of coping – or none that I could see – with the mental pain and confusion I was going through, and wished I had no one who cared about me, so I could just leave and disappear with minimal impact.

I sometimes think of that cliff edge. Of the scrubby grass I stood on, of the glittering sea I stared out at, and the limestone coastline stretching out. None of that, at the time, consoled me. Nature is shown to be good for us, but in the moment of crisis nothing helps. No view in the world could have made me feel any better in that moment of extreme invisible pain. That view won’t have changed much over two decades. And yet I could stand there now and feel its beauty, and feel so different to the terrified young man I had been.

The world affects us, but it isn’t quite us. There is a space inside us that is independent to what we see and where we are. This means we can feel pain amid external beauty and peace. But the flipside is that we can feel calm in a world of fear. We can cultivate a calmness inside us, one that lives and grows, and gets us through.

There is a cliché about reading. That there are as many books as there are readers. Meaning every reader has their own take on a book. Five people could sit down and read, say, The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin and have five totally different legitimate responses. It isn’t really about what you read, but how you read it. The writer might start a story but they need a reader for it to come alive, and it never comes alive the same way twice. The story is never just the words. It is also the reading of them. And that is the variable. That is where the magic lives. All a writer can do is provide a match, and hopefully a dry one. The reader has to strike the flame into being.