Work – Page 4 – My Outdoor Living Room

I think I’m getting old. The tell-tale signs are there. I won’t go into detail on all of them, but I think it’s healthy to admit it. One of the reasons I have for thinking this is that I seem to be fighting a lot nowadays. I don’t mean going down the pub and smashing a bottle over somebody’s head. Those days are well behind me. Luckily, last time, the victim didn’t press charges anyway, so I was quite fortunate. She was my mother-in-law after all. Anyway, I digress. By fighting, I mean standing up for things. People with flash LinkedIn profiles probably call this passionate, if at all they know what passionate means. I’ve discussed my job before here, and I think the main reason I hate it and seemingly suffer there is because I try to do my job right, and thoroughly, and I seem to be the only one. Everyone else has a wonderful day scraping by on the bare minimum required so they don’t get sacked. Whilst this mentality causes me to suffer at work, it does give me the strength and determination in other areas of my life to fight for something I feel is right, and is more likely to be a worthwhile cause, unlike my job which is feeding fat cats so they can get even fatter and do ridiculously unethical things with their money.

The point I’m getting to is as I’m aging, I’m realising that you suffer the most for things you fight for the most. Love Island would bore the living crap out of me, so I don’t watch it, but this same piece of asinine “entertainment” (can you tell I don’t like it?) could be the cornerstone of somebody else’s life. They could be involved in brawls over it. It bothers them, so they suffer for it. Football supporters are the same. Manchester United fans don’t give a rodent’s rear end about how Bristol City are getting on and vice versa but they will fight tooth and nail with City and Rovers fans all the same.

What is important to me are things like the environment, conservation, my own health and wellbeing and the health and wellbeing of my family and closest friends. I will stand up and fight for those when needed. I hate to forget my principles. I don’t feel they’re shallow and they are for the greater good.

I also believe that every little step in the right direction, no matter how small, is worth it. I’ve talked before about litterpicking and plastic pollution. Very small efforts everyday to fight these is still better than giving up. I sign petitions even though the odds are stacked ridiculously against the petitioners winning. I guess it’s called integrity.

Fighting is good, as long as it’s for the greater good. That definition is still too ambiguous to me however but it’s the closest I can get to a definitive one. Most of the problems we have in the world today are conceived from people fighting for the greater good until they work out their visions of the greater good are different. Then they fight each other.

My 18 year old self would look at me now and call me a miserable old git. I look at my 18 year old self and ask him why he didn’t fight enough for real things. That’s maturing though. I probably fall into the grumpy category. I struggle to recognise much today that I deem real enough to form an opinion on. The environment and self development are two big factors for me, and they go hand in hand. The environment and the state we leave it in will be our legacy in centuries time. It is a selfish act to harm our planet knowingly, saying “It’s not my problem because I won’t be around in a hundred years”.

If you’ve read this far, I think it’s worth mentioning that despite all of this, I do actually enjoy Christmas.

Despite feeling exhausted on Sunday morning when I woke up (a couple of hours before my alarm), I knew I needed to get out. I set out running just before six, heading off in the bright sunshine, heading in one direction – out of town.

It may be a modern human condition or something deep within us from generations gone by, but a lot of people feel the need to get outdoors to relax, escape and deal with various stresses. It is widely known that green is a relaxing colour, and I can’t help but feel this is deeply wired in us from when greenery surrounded us more than it does today.

Two miles in, and the houses are getting fewer and fewer. Hedgerows appear, copses, circling swallows and insistent skylarks. By the time I get to the woods, the silence and the low morning sunlight flooding in makes me stop and just sit. I sit down on a fallen tree and just soaked up the surroundings, immersing myself in nature and the feeling of breathing in the new day, replacing the negativity.

During the 1980s, the Japanese developed Shinrin-yoku, also known as forest bathing, which involves taking in the forest with the senses. You can either sit, or walk in a forest and soak everything up, just as I did. It doesn’t involve any high intensity exercise and has been proven to be very successful. A 2-hour forest bathe helps you to unplug from the working day, laptops, phones and other modern day distractions and stress enhancers.

It is predicted that by 2050, 66% of the planet’s population will live in cities. With cities and towns getting bigger and bigger, this is not too surprising. I always imagine cities like giant octopuses, spreading their tarmac tentacles out into the countryside, swallowing it in chunks and expanding their concrete mass as they go.

I know I will always favour the outdoors as therapy. It works for me in many ways to cope with modern life. Plus it’s much more interesting than 99% of what’s on television and spending hours reading silly blogs online. Oh, hang on…