So, welcome to my first outdoor video.
Sometimes it’s important just to get some nature time.
Now, this is not exactly the deep wilderness.
This is High Park in the city of Toronto.
There’s the sound of traffic in the background.
Some people walking their dogs not too far away.
But here I can be surrounded by some trees, and, at least partially, have a break from human civilization.
I’m not sure exactly why it’s so good to have this kind of time, but it seems like there’s something very restorative about it.
Because almost all our lives, for almost everybody who’s listening to this, I would bet that almost all our lives are spent in a human environment, living in a city or town, surrounded by human constructions on all sides, dealing with people through technology, and that’s what we live in.
That’s the world we live in.
It’s like human technology has created its own world.
We live inside walls, and we communicate using machines and tools, and we really don’t have to care that much about the environment outside that.
In fact, if someone was to decide to never spend any time in nature, they could certainly do that.
Now, it might not be the happiest, healthiest life, but there’s nothing stopping anybody on a practical level from spending their entire life surrounded by human construction.
Not only the physical environment is human, but the mental environment.
Everything that we deal with, we deal with human business, law, human concerns.
We don’t have to be concerned about the rules of nature and the way that nature works.
So there’s something about coming back to this kind of simple nature.
And it does almost feel like coming back.
It’s like in some part of our nature we remember that we did come out of nature.
As much as we can spend our entire lives within the human environment, we come from nature.
Somewhere in our deep past, and somewhere deep in our mind and deep in our memory, we have this sense of the wild nature.
So being able to come back here, it’s like it awakens that part of the mind that’s kind of sleeping while we’re between four walls and a ceiling and a floor.
Coming out here, even in this tame little rectangle of nature that we get in a city park, it’s a reminder of what’s there outside.
So this is- there’s something so healing and restorative and refreshing about just forgetting about humans for a while, just forgetting about the products of human construction.
Of course, not including the clothes I’m wearing that are keeping me warm, and of course the technology recording this and all that, but just no walls, no roads, no computers and technology, except for what I’m doing now just to record.
But if I wasn’t recording, I wouldn’t be looking at my phone right now.
I would just be looking at trees, sky, uneven ground that hasn’t been made into a smooth floor.
It’s like this world is bigger than the human world.
We live inside this human world, and it’s so easy to just treat that like it is the entire world.
But the whole human world is embedded inside this bigger universe that we’re in.
So, anything that can remind me of that I find helps to put everything in perspective.
I can take a deep breath of fresh air, remember what it’s like to not have humans, before going back to the human world.