I am proudly and unapologetically a city person. I hate being too far away from mass transit. I love being surrounded by other humans. The idea of living in a cabin in the woods miles from civilization is my worst nightmare.
But it’s not just that I love cities. I love the indoors. I love being on this side of a window screen while bugs are on that side. I abhor pooing in a hole in the ground that I was forced to dig myself. I think the inside of a movie theater is one of the most magical places on earth.
Even when I was a kid, my parents would sometimes have to yell at me to go outside.
“Get your nose out of that book!”
“You’ve watched enough TV!”
“Stop building that bomb shelter under the basement stairs! You’ve already amassed enough canned goods!”
(I blame the tail end of the Cold War for that last command.)
That being said, once I got outside, I usually had a glorious time. I loved riding bikes with my friends and going on picnics with them and collecting flowers and caterpillars that we would raise into monarch butterflies. I loved playing tag in backyards and climbing all the playground equipment in the summer. I loved ice skating and building snow forts and sledding in the winter. I loved knowing (during those last glorious days in the eighties when grade-school-age kids were allowed to disappear for hours at a time) that my friends and I could get up to all sorts of no-good as long as we were home by the time the streetlights came on each evening.
And from a young age, I loved going on walks—whether around a Minneapolis city lake with my mom or just from my house to a friend’s house a few blocks away.
The outdoors was full of possibilities and space to roam. Sometimes I just needed the urging to get out there.
As I grew older, I was urged less and less. Tests needed to be studied for, papers needed to be written, I had to get to my after-school jobs.
And once I hit adulthood, it wasn’t just that I had no one reminding me to go outside. The world had changed into a place where we never had to leave our houses to see one another or entertain ourselves. There was the Internet. There was Skype. There was Netflix. Even when I moved to New York—the city that ostensibly never sleeps—I found that people loved to stare at their devices as much as take on the town.
On top of that, the outdoors became more and more commodified and commercialized and seemingly out of reach for someone of my modest means. Hundred-dollar shoes and fifty-dollar canteens were suddenly required for an amble in the woods. Bikes that cost more than my annual rent seemed mandatory for cruising around with friends. High-performance outerwear replaced old T-shirts and beat-up shorts for anyone who just wanted to go for a jog.
And in the midst of all this, the one outdoor activity I’d always loved—going on walks in my city—was suddenly deemed “not an outdoor activity.” The outdoors industry (and SUV manufacturers and energy bar makers and a large swath of self-help influencers) made it clear that if you were surrounded by skyscrapers, you weren’t really enjoying the outdoors.
So even though I was still spending time outside and walking every day (and up to twenty miles per day on the weekends), I was doing the outdoors wrong, in the wrong clothes, and in the wrong location.
But if I was doing it all wrong, why did I still enjoy it so much? Why did wandering around for hours surrounded by tall buildings as an adult give me so much of the same joy I felt exploring the outdoors in my suburban Minnesota development as a small child?
There are a lot of answers one could give here. Maybe it’s because, as I mentioned in the chapter about putting down our devices, it gave my mind a chance to wander without a screen. Maybe it was, as Jolenta touched on in the Try New Things chapter, that walking sometimes took me to new places and gave me new experiences. Or maybe I just got joy from moving my body.
But I’m going to argue here—contrary to the views of some outdoors enthusiasts—that even on my city streets, I was getting a rejuvenating dose of nature. I was surrounded by more sky than I could get inside my apartment. I felt the wind on my face and the sun on my skin. Even with 8 million neighbors, I heard birds chirping. And for every four-lane road I walked along, there were fifty tree-lined brownstone blocks filled with squirrels, front gardens, and flowers.
According to Florence Williams, my theory might actually hold weight. In her book The Nature Fix, she says that the colors, patterns, smells, sounds, and textures of nature make us calmer, more empathetic, more positive, more creative, more focused, and healthier. What’s more, she insists we can enjoy the benefits of nature even in the most urban settings—which is exactly what I did while living by her book.
My husband and I walked through city parks and smelled the flowers. Each day, we admired our city birds—from sparrows to starlings to pigeons. We planted two gardens—one on our balcony and another, for growing herbs, inside our living room window. And I, in a truly unusual move for me, began taking a few minutes away from my desk several times a week to look at the leaves on the plants in the square outside my office and enjoy the clouds rolling by.
All these activities made me feel an amplified version of what I already felt on my long walks through the city. But as much as I loved having my life choices validated by Florence Williams, I also want to make something clear: I don’t think my belief in The Nature Fix was based just on confirmation bias. To illustrate this, let’s look at Jolenta’s relationship to nature and her experience with the book.
Jolenta grew up in Portland, Oregon, at the edge of the city, with a forest and a creek in her backyard. To her, nature has always meant sitting on the side of a babbling creek and watching the birds while smelling the rain beneath a canopy of ancient trees. When she goes west to visit her family, she always makes time to be by the ocean and go hiking.
But when we lived by The Nature Fix, Jolenta didn’t have the time or budget to just hop on a plane to the West Coast. She and her husband were in the midst of moving to a new apartment. They were dealing with packing and organizing and setting up a new home and all the other logistics that go into relocating.
Thus, Jolenta had to force herself to experience nature in a new way. Instead of sitting by a babbling creek in the woods, she sat on her fire escape at tree level and listened to her neighbor’s backyard fountain. Rather than walk through a forest, she and her husband hugged the tree outside their apartment building. And whenever she had a free moment, she tried to find the nature of New York City hidden in plain sight.
And here’s the thing: It all made her happier. A few minutes of fresh air made her feel calmer during her move. Hugging that tree outside her building with her husband made her feel more thankful for where she lived. And finding flowers growing out of the concrete made her pause and appreciate the world more.
Of course, no book is perfect. Jolenta and I both question Williams’s claims that nature can cure ADHD or PTSD or nearsightedness. And her assertion that we should all go on at least one multiday wilderness vacation per year shows a lack of awareness about most Americans’ economic realities.
But that being said, Jolenta and I have found that going outside makes us feel happier and calmer—whether the outside is on a fire escape, along a Minnesota lake, or on the edge of an Oregon forest. Look around. Breathe it in. There’s a huge, joyous world outside the bomb shelter, my friends.
Dear Kristen and Jolenta,
I just want to point out that the great outdoors doesn’t make everyone happier. Some of us have allergies to nature and are susceptible to sunburns and also hate the cold and bugs and pretty much everything else in the outside world. Personally, I’m much happier sitting on my couch and watching reality TV than I am on a nature trail. I’m an indoors person!
—IP
Dear IP,
We get it. Jolenta and I both have allergies to all sorts of outdoor things—from pollen and ragweed to the cold (yes, being allergic to the cold is a real thing; it’s called cold urticaria and I have it).
On top of that, we’ve both been known to get injured outside—suffering bug bites, sunburns, blisters, and scratches. There was even that one time that I got dragged out by the undertow at Fire Island, which resulted in my back being torn up by seashells and a sense of panic I’ve carried with me ever since, every time I’m near truly wild water.
Yes, the outdoors can be rough. And we don’t pretend that it’s for everyone. In fact, when we talked to Florence Williams, author of The Nature Fix, she even said that about 5 percent of people really and truly are legit indoors people. But she also pointed out a couple things:
We’re not trying to convince you to go outside. We’re not even trying to convince you to watch more nature programming. You do what feels good to you. But to us, what feels good is a bit of the outside from time to time, even if the outside is just an open window.
—Kristen