Walk in nature and recharge yourself

There’s something with nature that brings us back to our roots, to a state of peace. It almost forces us into mindfulness. We experience a sense of belonging there that calls to our guts and certainly cannot be felt in the city. It’s as if we were back in the womb of our mother, and metaphorically speaking, it’s the case: our bodies and minds were, and still are, shaped by nature and the environment we live in. Nature also energizes us and regular contact is essential to our well being. In that respect, it might be compared to sleep. «We can never have enough of nature» as Henry David Thoreau wrote (in Walden: Or, Life in the Woods).

Walking (and running) is what our bodies are made for. Using them in this manner is therefore deeply satisfying. Movement is at our core, we cannot stay still for too long. Being alive is in fact being in motion. Feeling the soil under our feet, one of them sinking slightly into the mud maybe, stepping on stones to massage our soles, all these sensations are literally grounding us. Our minds are focusing again on our bodies, their positioning, and motion, giving us a chance to reach a meditative state.

Walking in nature obviously combines the previous aspects, but gives also another dimension to life: exploring. We’re always on the quest for something different, something unusual. The ever-changing landscape contents at first our need for novelty and surprise. And even if it’s deemed to fail in our fully explored modern world, taking a walk in nature reminds us what our ancestors might have felt when discovering the world. We might even come to understand what Ralph Waldo Emerson meant when he wrote that «though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.»