Where was National Geographic when I needed it, back when teachers, seeing me gazing out the window, would accuse me of daydreaming?
“I’m not daydreaming,” I could have answered. “I’m enhancing my creativity and intellectual capabilities.”
In a recent article on the benefits of being outdoors and involved with nature, the venerable magazine noted that being closer to nature can improve creativity by 50 per cent. It said that students who can see trees and grass perform better in schools, and hospital patients with a view of greenery recover faster.
It quoted Dutch researchers who found that living near or within view of natural vegetation resulted in lower incidences of 15 diseases, including heart ailments, diabetes, asthma and migraines.
Two schools in the Greater Victoria School District have nature-kindergarten programs, and the competition for spots in those programs is fierce. Parents know that their children thrive in so many ways by being outdoors, being in touch with the Earth.
Trevor Hancock, the Times Colonist’s public-health columnist, writing on this topic for Earth Day last year, cited research that showed many benefits from living and working near greenery and the natural environment. They included lower levels of aggression against domestic partners, students achieving better scores on tests of concentration and self-discipline, higher levels of optimism and lower levels of crime.
“So while we might seem to be an urban species, divorced from nature,” wrote Hancock, “we are in fact a natural species misplaced in urban settings.”
So that desire to be outdoors is an instinct, our mind and body telling us what is good for us. That rationale would have come in handy those many times when I stood in the elementary school principal’s office, trying to explain why I was late.
Often, my tardiness was due to my favourite shortcut, which ran along a creek. Mathematically speaking, taking the diagonal instead of the two sides of a square cuts the journey by about a third. That particular formula, however, didn’t include the manifestations of nature observed along the way: how many blackbirds were building nests, the number of salamanders wriggling through the mud or the speed at which frogs plopped into the water.
And so the shortcut increased the time it took to get to school, as well as the frequency of visits to the principal’s office.
“By getting closer to nature, my academic performance will improve,” I could have said to the principal.
That hypothesis would not have stood me in good stead in high school, though — staring out the window at the hills beyond the edge of town is not conducive to learning French conjugations or grasping the intricacies of the binomial theorem.
Teachers, too, must occasionally look out the window and yearn to be outdoors. I remember one who gave in to that yearning.
Our Grade 5 teacher stood at the window on a bright spring day following a long winter, and observed that it was a pity to be imprisoned indoors. She abruptly left the room, returned a few minutes later and announced we were all going to the river for the rest of the day. She had even arranged for a school bus to take us there, probably at her own expense.
Memories have a way of blending into each other as time passes, but that day stands out sharply in my mind, especially the image of a plump, middle-aged teacher, wearing borrowed overalls, sitting happily by the river digging in the sand.
Perhaps she had been overtaken by spring fever, aptly described by Mark Twain: “When you’ve got it, you want — oh, you don’t quite know what it is you do want, but it just fairly makes your heart ache, you want it so!”
We can’t complain about harsh winters on Vancouver Island — a typical winter day here would be regarded as a fine spring day in many parts of Canada — but even so, we rejoice at the first daffodils and the blossoms on the cherry trees.
As the temperature creeps up and the days lengthen, spring fever wells up, and the best treatment is fresh air, sunshine, trees and water in generous doses.
It is not only good for the mind and body, but also — and tell your boss or teacher this — it improves performance and productivity.
