Left, right, left. Left, right, left. Crack in the cement sidewalk. Crunch of an acorn below your sneaker. Sting of the cold as the air hits your nostrils. Left, right, left. Left, right, left. Leaves moving swiftly with the gentle wind. Cars humming as they pass on by. Warmth growing in your chest. Left, right, left. Left, right, left. Blue jay flying overhead. Breath rhythmically entering and exiting. Pavement under your feet.
While the past eight months have created a heightened level of insecurity and instability in so many of us, the natural world has continued to exist just outside our protective doors. Each day presents the opportunity to engage with a sense of normalcy and grounding that we have become conditioned to overlook so easily. We are preoccupied with our fears, hidden in our proverbial caves, awaiting word on the spikes and numbers that will ultimately dictate our subsequent actions. We have become immobilized and paralyzed by the “What if’s” and live our days wrought with tension and stress. We cope through avoidance and escapism into our refrigerators, glasses of red wine, and electronic devices. We seek immediate boosts of oxytocin to soothe our discomfort and distress from both the days ahead and the ones behind. We retreat from moments in our day to ruminate on the past and anticipate the future as if doing so will magically erase and prevent more cracks to our inner sidewalks.
How often are we really paying attention to what is happening right now? Mindfulness is a practice that transcends the complexity that so many of us assume to be implicated in the long-sought secret to existential happiness. Meanwhile, its seeming simplicity contradicts the consistency and skill required to master its implementation in everyday life. Its lesson is well-demonstrated through the behavior of children and the novelty in which they experience their worlds; unless diverted by confounding factors within their lives, children live with presence, noticing the sights, smells, and noises around them. Even better so is mindfulness embodied in actions of our canine friends; I would be willing to bet that you will not catch your dog scrolling through Instagram as he enjoys his morning dish of water. Rather, he will be just as grateful and excited to have the same meal of dry dog food evening after evening, effortlessly focused on devouring every, last delicious bite without interruption from the evening news.
Throughout the course of Western human development, we are taxed with more demands on our ability to multitask and operate in multi-minded ways: we help with math homework as we monitor the status of the pork chops baking in the oven while simultaneously sending that last client email to close the final deal of the day. This hypothetical snapshot represents mere minutes of a day within which so many of us are inundated for hours on end with stress from all directions of our world. The more mental plates we juggle, the more often we are given accolades and recognized as a success. Our worth becomes defined by how high our threshold for stress can soar. One is left to wonder, however, how our quality of life might be compromised when dividing our reserves among multiple demands of attention versus nourishing a single point of focus at a time. Mindfulness runs contrary to our comfortably uncomfortable way of existing. The idea of intentionally and purposefully attending to one thing in this moment without judgment or interpretation might seem to many of us like a giant waste of time.
In our attempts to live life to its fullest, we may inadvertently trigger ourselves into a state of stress that prevents us from adequately processing and experiencing important aspects of our days. An overabundance of stress can cue the release of hormones that impair cognition and initiate a cascade of physiological fire alarms that have both short- and long-term consequences for an individual’s physical and mental health. When these patterns are sustained, we run the risk of programming ourselves into a constant state of fight, flight, or freeze. Externally, we miss the important messages contained within the incessant babble of our toddler on her daily trip to preschool. We cannot recall the route we took to the office today and did not ever taste that bagel we scarfed down as we exceeded the speed limit. We do not notice the cardinal sitting on the branch just outside the window overlooking the blue light of our laptop. Internally, we exhaust and overwhelm our systems, weakening our defense against illness and impairing our ability to perform mental and physical tasks to our full potential.
Biophilia is defined as the human tendency to be drawn toward nature. Among other persisting instincts adopted from our long-ago ancestors is our connection with the outside world. While a global pandemic crisis forces us to distance ourselves as social beings, it does not require us to divorce from nature altogether. The trees, bees, and seas possess no knowledge of pandemic crisis and rather cycle through their patterns of existence despite the gravity of the situation impacting their human neighbors. Comfort, connection, and company await us if we so choose to venture outside our four walls away from our electronic companions and carbohydrate love affairs. Our long-term relationship with nature is closely tied to our hunter-gatherer instincts and innate desire to move. Rooted within this seemingly simple intersection of movement and nature lies our personal recipe for healing.
Motion creates energy and inaction breeds fatigue. A body in motion will remain in motion and a body at rest can sink into the depths of unrest. Quarantine and social distancing guidelines have created barriers to our previously forced structure and mindless call to action. While many of us initially embraced the break from the chaos of everyday life, sedentariness may well have spread as rapidly as the virus. Our fears and depression cuddle up beside us on the couch and hunker down as we watch the evening news with trepidation; soon they weigh us down, making it harder to move from where we sit. Normalcy peers in through our windows as we close the blinds and lock the doors. Control is within our grasp despite the stories we write within which we play the part of the powerless mortal awaiting a miracle or superhero savior from the grips of this crisis.
While our bodies conserve energy, our minds vacillate between thoughts of the past and the future: “I can’t believe this happened” and “What if it gets worse?” Our days toss opportunities our way but we miss the ball because our heads are not in the game. As Henry Ford so importantly reminds us, “If you always do what you’ve always done, you will always get what you’ve always got.” Now that we have more insight into the problem, let us consider the change.
Brains benefit from being present. Brains benefit from movement. Brains benefit from being outdoors. If we combine these kernels of wisdom, we find a pathway in need of much travel. Travel cannot occur without extending an invitation to the body to host the commute. And we cannot exit our homes without first opening the door and taking the initial step out into the daylight. We can simultaneously permit the buzz of the self-defeating and negative chatter to play on within our minds and consciously direct our attention to the feel of those first footsteps, the ruffle of the wind, and the blue of the sky above us. We can act as if we are children or our fur-friends viewing the trees and the birds for the very first time. We can allow our open doors to extend far into the universe and with them release the previously hibernating tension and stress residing within the corners of our bodies.
As we reconnect with our purest form of self, we might so too shake hands with versions of play and joy that have gathered dust from many years of neglect and underuse. Running and walking are milestones of development toward which healthy bodies are inclined within the first years of life. When we examine our histories to determine our departure from these activities oftentimes interwoven into the narratives of early childhood, we find that the aforementioned demands of adulthood may be to blame for the grief and loss we suffer in our separation from activation. Our long-awaited reunion, both with health and with movement, lies right there in the initial blueprint laid forth by nature and our ancestry. Within youth is wisdom and with this wisdom we find youth. We must walk before we can run but doing so can lead us to great discoveries.
Emerson reminds, “What we seek we shall find; what we flee from flees from us.” Each of us possess the power to direct our days by approaching them with this new awareness in mind. While the fear and anxiety might insist upon tagging along for our initial travels, we might find that distance from them is created as we weather our new paths. We might even plan to extend the open door to them while not allowing them to distract too much of our attention. We can commit to a daily act of childlikeness and venture out to see what the world beholds. We can secure away our excuses and fully exist within our bodies by noticing the flex of a muscle, the feel of a shoe, the rhythmic bounce of a ponytail, and the cleansing nature of a breath. We can take in the leaves, experience the warmth of the sunshine even on the coldest of winter days, and we can follow the scurry of a squirrel gathering acorns below a tree. It is through these focal points that we begin to heal ourselves from the inside out.
The message is a simple one that already existed within you before these words ever hit this page: get moving, get outside, and just pay attention to that. One stride at a time leads us to the restorative rediscovery of the beauty and even momentary peace that can be easily overshadowed by darkness and fear. Tune into your pace and connect with your breath as you seek to again find your happy pace.