WHY I WALK…
Walking has a remarkable capacity to soothe the mind and help us think more clearly. Three writers explain how walking improves their lives…
Journalist Isabel Hardman writes of healing and mindfulness on the trail; author Jake Tyler advocates the mental-health benefits of hiking solo, and naturalist Dara McAnulty decompresses by tuning into wild nature.
During lockdown, I have walked among the same woods beside my house almost every day, yet no two days are the same. There are two ways of walking: to move and exercise, or explore and discover nature. The latter, for me, is as natural as breathing. I walk to seek knowledge. To observe. To tune out of the human world and into the wilder world of birdsong and leaf dance. Thrumming insects dart and land on dandelions, where I wait to watch, stopping my stepping rhythm to be still. These daily walks have been consistently joyful, in all weathers. Even with wind and rain lashing at my cheeks and eyes, I have felt exhilarating escape. Walking doesn’t always have to be a motion; it can have in-between moments of a sentinel’s watchfulness. Listening.
INTO THE MOUNTAINS
My best walks, though, have been yomps up the Mourne Mountains, where urgent upward pacing replaces lackadaisical ambling. The shift from ground to clouds, from cocooning to unshielded expansion. There is nothing like it. Nan Shepherd, the author of The Living Mountain, wrote of going ‘into’ mountains, not up them. I couldn’t agree more. Mountains have their own weather and their own song.
Sometimes skylark, mostly raven. Always wind. In these still spaces, while sat on shimmering Mourne granite tors, I feel relief and also melancholy. These are the moments when the past rushes in and freezes the insides. Processing is necessary, especially for an autistic teenager like me. I need these decompressions, so I can understand others and myself, and find my way through difficulties.
Walking, no matter which space you’re in, grows roots. To places, to people. To nature. It’s a time for contemplation and discovery. Wonder. It can be where we find the missing piece of a problem and gain perspective. To be propelled forward.
Dara McAnulty, aged 17, lives in Castlewellan, Northern Ireland, and is the author of Diary of a Young Naturalist (Little Toller Books, £16). The book, written when Dara was aged 14–15, won the 2020 Wainwright Prize
(for outdoors, nature and UK-based travel writing).
“I need these decompressions, so
I can understand others and myself, and find my way through difficulties”
Five years ago, I contracted post-traumatic stress disorder and spent a frustrating amount of time on sick leave from my job as a political journalist. I found my mind a terrifying, exhausting place. I couldn’t escape from the thoughts and fears I was struggling with.
I soon found that while I had to take my mental torture chamber with me on a walk, my surroundings started to distract me. I started to walk around the county where I lived, Cumbria, in search of the many wildflowers – particularly orchids – that grow there. On my walks to find these plants, I noticed that the roar of my illness became a backing track to my thoughts about what I could see and hear around me – the chiffchaffs cheekily singing to each other in the trees, the tiny orchids at my feet and the butterflies moving from plant to plant.
STATE OF DISTRACTION
The trickier the plant to find, the better it seemed to be for my mind. One day I spent four hours walking through the sand dunes at Roanhead near Barrow-in-Furness, hunting for an orchid called the dune helleborine (Epipactis dunensis). It wasn’t just the satisfaction of eventually finding this small but beautiful plant. It was also the way my mind went into a distracted state for those hours, too.
I now realise that what I was doing was a form of mindfulness, which is a way of refocusing our minds on what’s actually happening in the moment, rather than on all the things in the future we’re frightened of, or the times in the past we can’t forget.
Now, many years on, I still turn to a walk as the way to calm me down and change my perspective from inside my mind to the beautiful, endlessly fascinating outside world. It doesn’t cure me, but it at least provides some respite and makes the hard days just that bit more bearable.
The Natural Health Service: How Nature Can Mend Your Mind by Isabel Hardman, is available now (Atlantic Books, £9.99).