The Science of Nature Walks - when science confirms what Charlotte Mason knew

 

Reading at the creek while the boys explore somewhere, photo taken by me

Never be within doors when you can rightly be without.
Charlotte Mason, Home Education

I don’t usually recommend podcasts on my Substack since I figure everyone has most likely found the podcasts they like and are just about full up. I know I am. I have, I think, 3 podcasts I listen to regularly and that is it. But this episode from Huberman Lab, a long-form science and health podcast, was so good that I wanted to share it here in case any of you would find it beneficial. I really liked that it gave scientific backing to what Charlotte Mason recommended and what Mason homeschoolers have been practicing for over a hundred years: the importance and value of the humble nature walk.

Here is a link if you want to listen: How Nature & Other Physical Environments Impact Your Focus, Cognition & Health.

There is all kinds of anecdotal evidence validating time in nature. I have stories I could share about how just an hour outside reset all of the bad attitudes in our house. People have known since people began that being outside is good for us. But it is easy to set it aside as an optional, good-if-you-can-get-to-it kind of thing. I appreciated that the podcast host and his guest laid out the why behind the good effects, and that to get the positive benefits of being outside, you don’t have to commit to an hours-long excursion, though those are ideal. Even just a 20-minute walk outside in a modestly natural environment (a city street with some trees) will give you the benefit.

"How much time daily in the open air should the children have? And how is it possible to secure this for them? In this time of extraordinary pressure, educational and social, perhaps a mothers first duty to her children is to secure for them a quiet growing time, a full six years of passive receptive life, the waking part of it spent for the most part out in the fresh air."
Charlotte Mason, Home Education

If you can do this, do it. It is the best possible thing for everyone involved. But if you can’t, for whatever reason, it is wonderful to know that any time outside will benefit you and your kids. And that the outside can be quite urban. Again, this isn’t to say we shouldn’t seek out un-urbanized natural settings, but it is an encouragement to know that a little bit really does make a difference.

A great deal has been said lately about the danger of overpressure, of requiring too much mental work from a child of tender years. The danger exists; but lies, not in giving the child too much, but in giving him the wrong thing to do, the sort of work for which the present state of his mental development does not fit him. …give the child work that Nature intended for him, and the quantity he can get through with ease is practically unlimited. Whoever saw a child tired of seeing, of examining in his own way, unfamiliar things? This is the sort of mental nourishment for which he has an unbounded appetite, because it is that food of the mind on which, for the present, he is meant to grow.

Charlotte Mason, Home Education

I’m not going to rehash the entire episode, but some of the things I thought most interesting were:

• Time in nature restores our directed attention and focus by 20%

• A nature walk prepares our mind to work (relating to directed attention)

• the benefit of “soft fascination” and fractals to the mind and attention

• the tendency to think more about the past in Nature, perhaps showing that the experience of time passing slows when we are in Nature

• Art museums and galleries may have similar benefits to time in Nature

• Studies suggest that interaction with Nature may lessen aggression (I’ve seen that in my own kids on a smaller level)

• The benefit of time in Nature for people with ADHD

• The connection between creativity and internal visual space

• Recommendations for implementing more time in Nature

• Nature and it’s effect on “waking states”

It is just over two hours long, but I found it to be worth listening to, and more than once.

Nature and Attention; Charlotte Mason and Simone Weil

God has set us in a very fair school, has put us, not into some dark ill-lighted room or a chamber which in the noonday shows us only blank walls, but in a world where the very darkness is made wonderful with innumerable stars, a world whose cloud-curtains at morn and eventide are gorgeously enwoven, and whose floor is rich with the varied purples of spring, the green luxury of summer, the flames of autumn and the grey draperies and dazzling whiteness of winter.
Rev. Canon Rawnsley
From a Parents Union Review Article, Volume 15, 1904, pgs. 541-553

The Educational Value of the Habit of Observing Nature, an article available for free on AmblesideOnline, is worth reading, too. It is a little bit idealistic and sentimental, but I believe the author is spot on in what he says regardless.

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This is all play to the children, but the mother is doing invaluable work;
she is training their powers of observation.

Charlotte Mason, Home Education

If you have not read it yet, or if you have not read it in a while, I recommend Part II of Home Education. One thing I thought was very interesting is how much of the way Mason talks about observation and attention reminds me very much of the way Simone Weil talks about attention:

"Most often attention is confused with a kind of muscular effort. If one says to one’s pupils: “Now you must pay attention,” one sees them contracting their brows, holding their breath, stiffening their muscles. If after two minutes they are asked what they have been paying attention to, they cannot reply. They have not been paying attention. They have been contracting their muscles...
Attention is an effort, the greatest of all efforts perhaps, but it is a negative effort. Of itself, it does not involve tiredness. When we become tired, attention is scarcely possible any more, unless we have already had a good deal of practice. It is better to stop working altogether, to seek some relaxation, and then a little later to return to the task; we have to press on and loosen up alternately, just as we breathe in and out.
"Twenty minutes of concentrated, untired attention is infinitely better than three hours of the kind of frowning application which leads us to say with a sense of duty done: “I have worked well!”
But, in spite of all appearances, it is also far more difficult. There is something in our soul which has a far more violent repugnance for true attention than the flesh has for bodily fatigue...
Attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty and ready to be penetrated by the object. It means holding in our minds, within reach of this thought, but on a lower level and not in contact with it, the diverse knowledge we have acquired which we are forced to make use of. Our thought should be in relation to all particular and already formulated thoughts as a man on a mountain who, as he looks forward, sees also below him, without actually looking at them, a great many forests and plains. Above all our thought should be empty, waiting, not seeking anything, but ready to receive in its naked truth the object which is to penetrate it."1

This connects with the Huberman Lab episode. At timestamp 56:11, Dr. Marc Berman says, “Being in Nature…widens your cognitive landscape. And that’s why…you hear all these anecdotes where people are struggling to solve a problem. They can’t figure it out. They go for a walk in nature and then - boom - they solve the problem. Because the brain is still churning on that, right? But maybe being out in Nature sort of inspires this widening of attentional space internally.”

This is something we all could use, especially since we live in an environments that make near-constant demands on our directed attention. Learning to “suspend our thought” is learning to observe something divorced of our expectations or assumptions of it. We are learning to see and know a thing as it really is in itself.

Mason points out the benefits of this:

"It would be difficult to overrate this habit of seeing and storing as a means of after-solace and refreshment. The busiest of us have holidays when we slip our necks out of the yoke and come face to face with Nature, to be healed and blessed by
The breathing balm,
The silence and the calm
Of mute, insensate things.
This immediate refreshment is open to everybody according to his measure; but it is a mistake to suppose that everybody is able to carry away a refreshing image of that which gives him delight.
…this is no high poetic gift which the rest of us must be content to admire, but a common reward for taking pains in the act of seeing which parents may do a great deal to confer upon their children."

In order “to confer upon their children” this “act of seeing,” we must occasionally and indeed, “take pains.” There will be plenty of times that our kids don’t want to go for a walk, that we drag them outside just shy of kicking and screaming (maybe not) and troop them all to the woods or down the street until attitudes improve. Or until the mother’s attitude improves. In my experience, it was always a matter of waiting out the grumpies. In a recent Morning Time for Moms conference talk, hosted by

Cindy Rollins, Caitlin Beauchamp suggested that 2 hours is the amount of time a mother needs to wait out a young child’s boredom. In her talk, she mentioned “the magic that happens two hours in” to a day in Nature, when after about two hours, “they settle. They become a part of that place. They start wandering and they start seeing because, y’all, it takes that long sometimes.”

I just witnessed the truth of this yesterday with older kids, when I insisted we stay in the woods where we were playing in the creek, and my teenage boys, after 2 hours, reacclimated and started enjoying themselves again. It was worth the pain of insisting we stay. We all came home tired and happier.

For us, time in Nature during our school days is going to look different. I don’t have young children anymore. I have some runners so their time in Nature is going to be apart from me sometimes. But I think the benefit of time spent together in Nature is important and we will continue to fit it in as we can when we can however we can. I want them to see that this habit of time in Nature is not for when we have days full of free time only, but just as much for days of tasks and events. Time in Nature is restorative, and we never outgrow our need to be restored.

It would be well if we all persons in authority, parents and all who act for parents, could make up our minds that there is no sort of knowledge to be got in these early years so valuable to children as that which they get for themselves of the world they live in. Let them once get touch with Nature, and a habit is formed which will be a source of delight through life. We were all meant to be naturalists, each in his degree, and it is inexcusable to live in a world so full of the marvels of plant and animal life and to care for none of these things.

Charlotte Mason, Home Education

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Waiting for God, Simone Weil