How I will learn to stop worrying (and love outside)

In which Hari talks about the 1000 hours challenge, green poverty and how she doesn't really like the sun

I’m not a jealous person, honestly I’m not, but one thing that pisses me off more than anything is that everyone seems to be having a better time outside than I am. Idyllic images of hikes in the sun, picnics in the park and bathing in the forest - everyone seems so serene, even their pictures look like they were taken out of an 18th Century travel manual. When I’m outside, I’m sweating, I’m overheating, I’m probably developing a migraine from being in the sun for all of 20 seconds without a hat. I go into the wild only to be reminded that even factor 50 will not protect me from sun burn, I have the lung capacity of a sickly rodent and horse flies exist. It’s not cute, it’s not serene and it’s certainly not beautiful. The fact is, when I’m outside, in this primal space that we’re all supposed to be designed for – that is supposed to connect us to our truest selves – I’m often having an average time at best and a bloody awful one at worst.

This isn’t to say I hate nature. I don’t, I love nature. I have read so much about nature. I’m just pretty sure nature doesn’t like me, and I’m actually really envious of the people who seem to have such an easy time getting to know it. I try to push through the feelings of discontent I have by telling myself it’s actively positive for me to be outside. That I am exercising my right to be wild and untamed. That I’m getting something I wouldn’t get inside (even if all that is is fresh air). That it’s simply good for me. But it somehow just doesn’t stick, I often just can’t convince myself to do it. I think there are several parts to play in this phenomenon. One is that I am ill quite a lot, one is that I don’t have ready access to a car and the other is that my job is to write, teach and research, so I am at a desk thinking a lot of the time. Reader, let’s take these things apart one by one and see if we can work out if I can finally succeed in completing the 1000 Hours Challenge.

For those of you who don’t know, the 1000 Hours Challenge was designed to get parents to get their children to spend more time in nature. The idea is that, come rain or shine, you get outside and explore – you get your children to connect to the natural world. It’s an important thing to do. Richard Louv, in the introduction of Last Child in the Woods says:

‘Within the space of a few decades, the way children understand and experience nature has changed radically… Yet, at the very moment that the bond is breaking between the young and the natural world, a growing body of research links our, mental, physical and spiritual health directly to our association with nature – in positive ways. Several of these studies suggest that thoughtful exposure of youngsters to nature can even be a powerful form of therapy for attention-deficit disorders and other maladies. As one scientist puts it, we can now assume that just as children need good nutrition and adequate sleep, they may very well need contact with nature.’

The argument about whether ADHD is a ‘malady’ aside (we can discuss mental health in more detail in later articles), if it’s true for children then it’s true for adults. Meaningful time in nature is important for our health and well-being, isn’t it? So, this is why, dear friends, I have committed to the 1000 hours challenge so many times. And yet, I fail so many times.

I am ill an awful lot. I, like many young women in the UK, have some kind of unexplainable condition that the doctor can’t identify. It impacts my health and well-being, means I’m at near-constant risk of viral infection and live excessively in fear of adrenal fatigue. I can sleep for between 1 and 3 hours in an afternoon and still sleep for 7-9 hours in a night. I am tired, I am frequently semi-feverish, and I am prone to headaches. This is not the ideal status for a ‘whatever the weather’ mentality. Even worse, I am very likely to get migraines if I go outside in the sun without a hat (this has even occurred if I sit by a sunny window), and I am likely to over-heat if I keep a hat on too long. Yes reader, I know I would be dead by now if this were the Victorian times, but I’m not dead and I am trying to complete the 1000 Hours Challenge, so we need some solutions.

Solutions that are very important for my mental health. On top of all of the above, I also have mental health complications from experiencing chronic stress and trauma as a young adult. In 2022, I experienced something between a psychotic break and an OCD meltdown. It took me over a year to recover fully, and I still live in fear of it returning. Nature, despite all its failings, was a huge help to me during that time. It gave me peace, a separation from the things that made me feel afraid, and a sense of being connected to something greater than myself. Now I’m not living with such serious mental ill-health, and it’s not all guns blazing to avert a continuous mental health crisis on the part of my loved ones, we can acknowledge two major issues: I don’t have a car of my own, and I work a lot.

When you don’t have a car of your own, you can’t travel to nature reserves without someone else. Common sense. I live in Caerphilly. Unless I want to go to Caerphilly Mountain or the park by the castle for the 1000^th time, I have the option to walk for over an hour from my house or catch public transport and then walk for maybe slightly under an hour. I have an allotment, even that’s a 15-minute drive away. Now I am not unfit, I could walk an hour or more, but then I really feel like my time-outside-quota has then been met just walking to whatever area of natural beauty that I’ve selected. I don’t have the time or the energy to do that. I could walk around town, and I frequently do, but it’s not giving ‘nature’, it doesn’t feel in the spirit of the thing. I am consigned to going into nature on other people’s schedules, even as a young (mostly) able-bodied woman in my 20s. Imagine what it’s like for other people with more severe or complex disabilities, single parents without transport or the elderly who don’t have licenses. It’s just not a thing. It’s not the vibe. It’s giving ‘green poverty’.

And even if travel were a thing, we come to this: I work a lot. I am strapped to a screen a lot. I could take my laptop to a park, I hear you say. Reader, I live in Wales. Have you been to Wales? It rains almost every day. Even when the weather app says it’s going to be sunny, it will rain. I cannot trust the sky to be a reliable friend to me and my technology, and I can’t take a tent with me because crunchy mothers everywhere have agreed that tents don’t count for the 1000 hours challenge anyway (this is a bone of contention for me, but we will cover that another time). I am, then, consigned to putting nature into my free time. Louv in a later part of Last Child in the Woods says that being outside can help with ‘attention-retention’. Part of being in nature is ‘finding stillness’ but to do that you have to have the means to stop splitting yourself in the first place. Because of this – and I can’t be the only one who feels this – I keep feeling that I have to make my time in nature ‘count’, which means I can’t really ever commit to fully being ‘in’ nature.  

The truth of the matter is, whenever I am outside, I am bothered by all the things that don’t make my time in nature ‘quality’ time, whatever that means. My time outside is so squeezed and opportunity-dependent that I feel like it has to be good. So, when there are cars and noise and the park feels too people-ified and there’s horseflies in the wild places and the sun is too hot and the rain is too wet, I feel like I’m being cheated. It doesn’t feel healing, it feels annoying. The problems I’m talking about are not unique to me, and they don’t even affect me as much as they do other people, but they hit on a truth: either I have to enact systemic change (which I somehow don’t think I’m going to do in a single year), or I have to lower my expectations. Both of myself and of nature.

Maybe, then, let’s not do 1000 hours. This makes me nervous even writing it, because it feels like I’m compromising on some sort of ideal. I’m moving away from perfection into mediocrity. But that’s what this is about, embracing mediocrity. Maybe let’s half it. 500 still seems like a lot, though. Maybe let’s half it again. 250 seems like a little too little - that’s not even an hour a day.

365 then. An hour a day. Come rain or shine. Well, we’ve covered that the rain doesn’t really work for me. Maybe not an hour every day then. 365 hours over the year. And then we’ll go from there.

That seems ok to me. That seems do-able, and meaningful. That seems like something we could all learn something from. How does that sound to you?