'Even the tiniest kinds of engagement with nature deliver a
psychological boost'
'German researchers reported that merely seeing a green
rectangle for two seconds led to measurable improvements on creative tasks.
You'd be hard-pressed, these days, to find a psychologist who
doesn't think we'd be better off if we spent more time in nature. The problem,
for those of us who live in cities and work at desks, is the "time"
part: there never seems to be any.
Whenever I make it into the hills for a
couple of days, I'm so rejuvenated I swear I'll start doing it fortnightly.
Then I don't. "Climb the mountains and hear their good tidings… the winds
will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy,"
wrote the naturalist John Muir, enticingly – but that's too rarely an option.
