The powerful connection between nature and our happiness

There’s a powerful connection between nature and our happiness. Picture: istock

Do you surrender to the wild, often; the wild which stirs something within because we are all animals, after all, creatures among others on this planet. And so much the better if our surrendering to natural wonder is with our fellow species; awestruck, within community. It’s an image to savour: we puny humans, seamed into nature and humbled by it; existing in communal joy. We all need an awakening now and then to the power greater and more mysterious than us, which is this wondrous planet. And we must notice nature closer, more keenly, for that way happiness lies. Bliss.

Recently we all got a gift in terms of this wonder-world when a series of auroras entranced Earth’s southern and northern extremities. If we weren’t lucky enough to witness them in person we saw pictures all over social media, across several heady nights. The fortunate ones were united within nature as they gazed up at vast curtains of moving, pulsing light dancing across the sky. Almost our entire species was pulled together in planetary awe, for who wasn’t aware of the celestial spectacle? We all felt a little more connected over those nights; united in beauty.

It’s a fact that immersing yourself in nature is repairing. It’s linked to improvements in mental and physical heath, in depression and anxiety. Doctors sometimes employ what are known as “green prescriptions” or “blue prescriptions” – nudges for patients to spend more time in green spaces or near bodies of water. Australian academics recently reviewed existing research on the impact of nature on wellbeing. Research co-leader, Professor Thomas Astell-Burt from the University of Wollongong, is a population health expert. “You go out for a walk in a green space which helps with fitness,” he explained. “[But] that also helps to improve your mental health, reduces loneliness, improves sleep, and can also help to reduce one’s blood pressure. These outcomes aren’t independent of each other.”

Nature buoys the mind. I look at the posse of diehards around me still persisting with their ocean swimming as the weather clenches – and everyone seems beaming, good natured, glowing; their minds soothed and bodies strengthened as they immerse themselves daily in the tonic of nature. It is joy. Communal joy.

My son’s school talks about the importance of “green time” – medicinal moments away from relentless, souls sapping screens, and how important this is for a child’s development. The medicine of communal joy in nature is one reason it’s such a tragedy so many of our music festivals are folding. These magnets of fun for our nation’s young also draw them to roads less travelled; get them camping out bush and mucking in dirt.

The bleak antithesis of all this? Occasional pictures on social media, snapped in Tasmania, of mighty felled trunks on the back of logging trucks. The heart flinches. The abomination of a glorious Eucalyptus regnans felled, a gum tree hundreds of years old with a trunk more than three metres in diameter. Who are we, to do this? Bob Brown says that destroying trees of this size, “still unimaginably strong and youthful”, is “globally shameful”. Tasmanian Greens leader Rosalie Woodruff describes it as a “crime against nature”.

Grace Tame recently posted on Instagram about running in Victoria’s Great Ocean Road race, pushing through brutal headwinds and horizontal rain. “Before beginning you make a pact with nature that whatever will be, will be,” she wrote. “What follows is a spiritual negotiation in the elements.” It was a beautiful, wild, empowering experience. She concluded, “We run, just as we live; to be together,” and you could feel the exhilaration through all her words; the exhilaration of being marinated in mighty nature, the bliss of the communal joy.