MIND MOVES: "I went into the forest because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived" - (Henry Thoreau - Walden) It's time to recharge body and soul, says Tony Bates.
EVERY YEAR, about this time, I try to get into the wild to recharge body and soul. This time round I returned to an old log cabin in the vast tracts of forest woodland, south of Louisville, Kentucky.
I had been there last June for a week; now I was back a month earlier this year, while the temperature was still a fresh 70 degrees, and mosquitoes hadn't yet made their appearance.
Thoreau went into the woods to "front" the essential facts of life and learn whatever it had to teach him. My aims were more modest. I wanted to rest, to recharge my batteries and do some thinking.
In common with Thoreau, I wanted most of all to experience life in a more vivid and immediate way. To take the time to really notice things around me in this beautiful and precarious world.
I didn't come here so much to find Nature as to be found by Nature.
By slowing down to its rhythm, to find my own natural rhythm. To learn to walk rather than pace through the woods, to let my body sleep after it had become dark and rise with the morning light.
There is a phenomenon in cognitive psychology known as "thin slicing". It refers to the way the mind processes information in the blink of an eye and forms a "gut impression" about some aspect of the environment.
What is remarkable about this function of the mind is that it allows us to form judgments and make decisions on the basis of minimal, or very "thin slices", of information.
You can see this working in recruitment interviews, where interviewers will report that they came to a firm (and sometimes valid) conclusion regarding a candidate's character, 15 seconds after they entered the room.
Nature, however, doesn't like it when we "thin slice". She requires of us a much more attentive courtship. A walk in the woods can easily become a speed date, but if you want to be invited into something approaching intimacy rather than a brief flirtation, then you need to slow down and pay attention.
Day by day I eased myself into the silence of a forest. I say silence, but what struck me most each time I stepped into its green canopy was the volume of sound that erupted around me: birdsong, wild turkey, running deer, creek water and the loud swish of the trees being blown around by a strong early morning front each making their own particular mark in the dynamic changing soundscape.
One might be tempted to regard solitude as the indulgence of some antisocial whim.
But the great pioneers of solitude, like Thoreau, Emerson, Merton and others, emphasise that we need time apart from other people, not to escape them, but to learn how to find them.
Without periods of solitude we can become so caught up in the machinery of modern life, that we can lose an awareness of our own and others' deepest human needs. We become lost in the crowd.
To live in community and relate genuinely to others is absolutely necessary to become human. But to live in the midst of others, sharing nothing but noise, cliches and slogans repeated over and over, isolates us from one another in the worst way.
We listen to one another without hearing, we respond without thinking.
Solitude offers opportunities for silence and reflection and in these moments we rediscover what it is that we want to say with our lives and how we can deepen our relationships with others.
Solitude may be a week in the forest, a midday stroll through a city park, a quiet moment in a darkened church, or sitting watching the tide come in. But it can help you to feel real again and give you back a sense of what you want to say to the world.
Not that you may use many words, but when you speak, it's more likely you will have something of substance to say, something unique and personal, that comes out of your own experience, rather than being conditioned by whatever fashion dominates the culture in which you live.
• Tony Bates is founder and director of Headstrong - The National Centre for Youth Mental Health ( www.headstrong.ie)
