Anna Badkhen: “In the face of ‘too much’ we gradually become dry, our hearts get tired, our energies become spare,” writes Clarissa Pinkola Estés, poet and trauma counselor. I had hoped to rarify input. On and off, for a year, I herded cattle with a family of Fulani cowboys, who spend their lives ambulating the semiarid grasslands between the Sahara and the tropics and inhabit a very modest pre-monetary and pre-modern culture. I was researching a book about transience, and I had thought that, perhaps, in the course of my work I could learn whether and how life in sparse environments helps us slow down.
Scientists say busy minds make us sad and less alert. This holds true for me. What causes my cognitive overload is probably what causes yours: deadlines, ambitions, chores, parenting worries, and how all of these often seem impossible to juggle. When my mind is crowded in this way I fail to notice the beauty that nurtures it. A cardinal’s enchanted scarlet flight on a monochrome winter run in Philadelphia. The hollow flutter of a moth wrestling out of a cage of agave. The unfathomable embrace of the universe that accommodates tigerfish teeth and the electromagnetic song of the comet 67P both. A friend’s kindness. I grow too hard-pressed to be astonished by the ineffable in the world, my well-being withers, and I become terribly blue, sometimes for days, for weeks.
[…] Part of the correlation between open space and slowing down is evolutionary: Humans were born in the savannah. Our feet are built to walk on hot, dry soil, our brains are built to endure in boundless expanses. The sheer volume of lucid air fills the mind, the distant skyline paces off a spirit level of calm. Research shows that people draw jagged, pointed shapes when asked to draw representations of anger, and horizontal lines to illustrate peacefulness. More here.