February 5, 2024
I know Mondays always come quick, but they still surprise me. This morning, I woke up feeling a little tired, my mind busy. I had a quarterly presentation to give to the new head of our organization. Although courteous and professional, expectations are high for organizing high quality information in a way that is both brief and complete. Follow-up questions are always a possibility, so I try to anticipate questions people might ask. Sometimes, I’ll preempt these by giving additional information in the presentation and other times I will hold answers more closely in case they are not important to my audience. Over the weekend, I developed three questions I did not have answers to, so I met with several people before my meeting to resolve them.
During lunch break, I needed some space from my computer, so I gathered the trash and made a trip to the trash service center. Taking the trash takes less than ten minutes, but it is an enjoyable break when my home transforms into a busy office.
After work, I went into the woods, heading to Beaver Teeth Rock with a small chair where I planned to sit down in the quiet. The walk through the trails always seems new. The dried pine needles that carpeted the grove had dozens of swirls where deer, and probably squirrels, used their muzzles to search out mushrooms and stray corn kernels. I stopped to take a picture of a tree limb that was backlit by the sun's rays that cut through the forest’s edge. That’s when I noticed several trees had what appeared to be tiny buds forming. They weren’t quite ready to sprout, but the ends of the tree’s limbs were definitely transforming. Last year, I read a book about trees that detailed how they wait for a certain length of day and consecutive number of warmer days before they bud. Amazingly, different trees and flowers bloom on different schedules to increase their likelihood of being pollinated with the correct species.
When I arrived at the large boulder where I like to sit, I turned off a trail camera I have set up in the area so it wouldn’t waste its efforts on me. I sat there quietly for several minutes, soaking in the silence. While the forest is not completely silent, it amazes me how much less sensory input there is than a life lived away from nature. I don’t own a television, but I have a laptop, tablet, smart phone and watch. With these tools and the internet, it is easy to get bombarded with mental noise. Luckily, these things are under our control.
Nature is calm. You might hear birdsongs, wind rustling through the treetops, or the bark of a deer, but there’s not much else going on. Sometimes, I feel like my mind mirrors its environment. When I visit the city, I feel inundated with stimuli to the point of discomfort. But when I am in the forest, my mind feels clear. There is room to relax mentally and breathe. Now that I have some time living in the woods, cityscapes and sounds feel harsher and overstimulating. I think those who live in the city become accustomed to their environment, but I don’t think they realize the physical and mental toll it places on a human being.
My mind seems to have a limit to how much mental work in can process in a single day. When I wake up in the morning, my brain feels fresh. But after a long day of reading, writing, interacting with people, and other cognitive tasks, my mind eventually tires and loses its ability to perform at its best. This is one reason I changed from a lifelong nighttime owl to an early morning person. I found that at day’s end, when I had time to engage in creative activities such as writing, I struggled to produce an adequate amount of work. Waking up early allows me to do those tasks which are important to me first. Since I started going to bed at nine and waking up at four, my productivity has skyrocketed.
It has become apparent that each morning, after a good night’s sleep, my brain’s gas tank is full. But like a car, it only has so many miles it can go before that tank is empty. Thinking uses miles. So does reading, interacting with others, and making decisions. But most importantly, useless mental stimulation like social media, the news, podcasts, television, and the like also burns miles in your mental gas tank. These miles don’t benefit us and only use up the energy we need to do more important things.
I’ve noticed that starting my morning off with YouTube, Facebook, or other social media platforms shortens my mileage for the day. Therefore, time in the woods has become important to me. When I’m in nature, I’m filling up my mental gas tank and not driving around in circles. It has become my practice to stay away from the news, social media, and the internet unless it is being used for work or personal projects that matter. It also goes a long way towards reducing anxiety and mental hyperactivity from bombarding our mind with poor, useless information that baits our mind’s primal instincts. Information can become addictive, and the trashier the content, the more likely we are to become controlled by it.
My time at last light was relaxing; a confirmation that my mind’s ability to work was finite, and that nature has a way of giving more than it takes. It was almost dark, so I packed up my things, turned the trail camera back on, and headed south back toward my home.