Get outside!
Two months ago, I was wondering to a friend about the fact that I was feeling dull and perhaps a little (please know that this is a very dirty word in my book so I feel like I should whisper it) bored. To remedy these uncomfortable feelings, I was toying with applying for an additional position at the university where I teach that would change my part-time position into a full-time job. In response to my list of pros and cons – and there were more pros than cons – my friend, who knows me very well, asked a surprising question: “Is it possible that you’re just feeling cooped up? That as soon as you can get outside again and get your hands dirty, you’ll feel better?”
Thankfully, her question slowed me down on that job application. As my little corner of southeastern Pennsylvania has begun to emerge from our especially long and frozen winter, my sense of having enough to keep me engaged and happy has indeed started to shift. Though it’s still too early to plant, the tasks of early spring – picking up sticks, pruning bushes, cleaning up piles of winter detritus – lure me outdoors. Even when there is nothing to “do” I find myself wandering my yard checking to see who is peeking their little head up through the earth and wondering if they need a new friend.
Even indoors activities are stepping outside. More often than not these days, I take my lunch or dinner out to the patio. If I’m taking an afternoon break with a book, it’s pretty much guaranteed that I’ll be in the hammock. If I could only invent a laptop screen that was clear and visible outdoors, I am positive I would be grading papers out there, too!
Which is all to say, I am not feeling antsy or bored (phew) or at loose ends at all. Simply being able to be outside has made a huge difference. Breathing fresh air, feeling the sunshine on my face, joining in the great awakening of spring has helped me to feel more alive and awake myself.
Being outdoors is good for the soul
My teacher, Richard Rohr, explains how being outside can possibly be so healing and enlivening:
“The material world is the place where we can comfortably worship God just by walking in it, loving it, and respecting it. Everything visible, without exception, is the outpouring of God. What else could it really be?”
When I step outdoors – not even into the wilderness but simply into my own little yard – I am joining something greater than myself. I never wasn’t a part of the whole of Nature, but somehow during this long, cold winter, a part of me had forgotten; a part of me had started to feel a little small and cramped in the confines of my indoor life.
Rohr describes the experience of being in nature as communion – which, according to Merriam Webster, means intimate fellowship and rapport. I love this! This is exactly how I feel when I’m out in my yard – welcome, happy, integral, useful, completely comfortable. In short, I feel the joy and relief of being part of something that is much bigger than myself. Something that is far beyond my control, but where my curious and playful participation is smiled upon. Something where my “doing” is well-received but not demanded. Even were I to do nothing but witness the miracle of life in my yard, I would be doing plenty.
If I hadn’t gotten stuck inside, getting outside wouldn’t feel so good
Another of my teachers, this one beyond time, Patanjali, teaches that everything in this world of ours exists for our growth and spiritual evolution (YS 2.18). In other words, just as the world – the soil, the rain, the sunlight, and even the cold and darkness of winter – is here for the growth of the plants that bring me so much joy, the same is true for you and me. And for you and me, this world provides so much more than earth, water and light. It offers us friendship and relationships, successes and failures, loves and losses, times of sweetness and times of struggle. It offers us the whole of Life.
Steven Colbert advised Anderson Cooper that if we are to believe that life is precious, then we have to believe that all of life is precious. Plants need their cold winter rest in order to spring back to life and bear flower and fruit. We have to receive our difficulties and heartbreaks (and also our dull times of boredom) as having as much value as the parts of life we naturally treasure. In short, we cannot truly experience life’s joys is we refuse to experience “the rest of” life.
Had my winter not been tinged with boredom, the joy I have felt as the world around me has come back to life would not have felt as enlivening as it does. So, I am deeply surprised to be feeling perhaps not thankful, but somewhat grateful for my (I’ll stop whispering to give it some respect) boredom. Had it not felt so uncomfortable, I might have missed the deep rightness of my renewed communion with the world around me.
In his commentary on Yoga Sutra 2.18, Alan Finger teaches that the more we align our lives with the greater life of the world around us, the more we are able to remember who we really are (a tiny, vibrant, integral part of this world), so we can “slice through life with ease and grace.” (Alan Finger, Tantra of the Yoga Sutras, p. 50) While I don’t know if I’m actually “slicing through life,” the wholeness and contentedness I feel at being outdoors again sure feels like “ease and grace.”