Nature teaches us many lessons about balancing our minds and appreciating all sides of the whole. With experience in nature we thus become better at dealing with reality.
In modern life it often feels like something is wrong, as if we need to be chasing something we feel we lack. We need to have more “wealth,” “success,” “happiness,” “beauty,” we need to accomplish some goal, we need a more vibrant social life, we need to make all our problems go away, we need to become better than we are, etc. This never seems to end. We often try to control our way to some mentally imbalanced “happy” state. Sometimes we’re so busy controlling our way to our imbalanced future of happiness that we forget to laugh. Even when we realize that there’s not actually some blissful finish line we generally go on living like this. I find this strange but I’ve done it quite a bit myself.
Here’s one thing I’ve realized about this phenomenon: when I’m out in nature challenging myself or training and learning new sports nothing really feels wrong or feels missing. As painful and difficult as adventures can be they always make great stories (this is sometimes referred to as “Type 2 fun” and, in my experience, describes most nature based challenges). When I go back into the buzz of the “civilized” world, however, things can quickly start to feel lacking again and I become imbalanced in my mind. As much as maintaining balance in my mind outside of nature is a struggle for me, I’ve become better at this with time and practice. Nature teaches these skills and what we develop in nature can be used in our artificial modern lives. Having spent a number of years in corporate America, my main suggestion for improvement there is “recess.”
It seems to me that our imbalanced thinking and our often polarized perceptions are largely rooted in our separation from nature. Nature represents a complex and constantly moving (sometimes extremely volatile) balance of forces. Underneath all of our beliefs, we’re still parts of nature so trying to fundamentally escape or resist a similar internal mix of energies seems futile. Although we can be very strong fighters in the short term with strategies of resistance, to be healthier and more sustainable athletes and people in the long term we’re better off learning to appreciate the full balance and volatility of nature and work with it.
Time and experience in nature helps us learn this. Nature operates as a dynamic balance and a series of complex and interdependent cycles. Each part of the cycle is a vital link in the whole and each aspect of the balance is necessary. Forest fires, for example, are actually nature’s way of keeping forests healthy. This may seem abhorrent to us given that we have decided to value ideas like “property” but there are billions of other less extreme examples where fighting nature, failing to appreciate its balance in full, or breaking its cycles causes us to be unhealthy and unsustainable in our bodies, minds, and in our lives.
Recently I’ve been thinking of this as I’ve worked on changing my relationship to rain in the middle of a rainy week. Growing up in sunny Colorado, I’ve never done well with clouds and rainy days. When it’s wet and cloudy, my energy levels are lower, my moods are a little depressed, and I often can’t do all the same things I would normally want to do on a sunny day. As an outdoor athlete, I have generally disliked rain and viewed it as an impediment to training. However, thinking like this hasn’t helped me and we can actually shift our perspectives very quickly with a bit of attention. It’s actually crazy to resist and not appreciate something like rain that is a critical nurturing force supporting the survival of all life on Earth. Rain is something that for many millennia our ancestors prayed to their gods for. Hence I decided to celebrate the rain and accept feeling less energy and a bit down as a good thing. I am still getting outside and doing a decent amount of running and walking outside in the rain. I find exercise in the rain to be particularly emotionally cleansing.
Following nature rather than fighting it helps us learn to appreciate fullness. I’ve become convinced this is an essential part of managing a long term athletic life. Over the long run our training is optimized when we learn to match our training loads and intensities to the fluctuations in our energy levels. Low energy or times of rain can be important signs telling us to nurture other areas of our lives besides training. This is one area where exercising outdoors gives us another advantage; it can be difficult to tune in to our bodies in artificial environments with flashing screens, blaring speakers, artificial light and temperature controlled environments. When we train in the artificial world we have a tendency to overly focus on our schedules, resist what our bodies are telling us, caffeinate, and force workouts. Ultimately, doing this can shorten and suppress our athletic lives because it will pull us out of sync with our bodies and with nature.
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