We Turned Being Human Into A Trend

I was being interviewed for a podcast about paying attention.

At some point, the conversation turned to walks. I mentioned, casually, that it wouldn’t occur to me to listen to music or a podcast on my daily walk in nature. I want to hear the birds. My own thoughts. The stillness. This is something I’ve loved to do for a long time - not as a practice or some deliberate act of mindfulness. Just as a natural thing to do when I step outside for my walk in nature.

The interviewer paused and said she always uses her walks to catch up on podcasts. Two things done at once. Efficient. Sensible. A small victory over a day that never has enough hours.

Thus, she found my silence interesting. Not strange or wrong. Just genuinely, mildly remarkable. Worth noting. Worth writing about in her episode description afterward, where she called it “a powerful reminder of how getting back into nature can help us reconnect with ourselves.”

I read that and sat with a feeling I couldn’t quite name at first. Powerful? I was walking. In silence. It didn’t feel anything special or different. Yet, apparently, it was.

I thought, I guess I am different, and I like it. But, THIS should be normal, not different.

What happened to us that enjoying stillness is something worth mentioning?

Somewhere along the way – without a single moment anyone asked for it – we drifted so far from our own nature that we can no longer recognize it when we see it.

Did you realize? The ordinary became exotic. The natural became noteworthy. The things a human body and mind have always needed, such as silence, movement, sleep, fresh air, and time in nature, became discoveries. Research topics. Trends. Products you can buy.

However, we didn’t realize. Because the drift was so gradual, and the alternatives were so loud, and eventually the abnormal became normal enough that nobody questioned it anymore.

Consider what serious, credible institutions are now solemnly announcing. Some examples of what I found:

“Our first finding was that nature has a very powerful effect.”. Or: “A new study has surprising insights into how spending time outside affects our wellbeing.” Or, check out this one: “A 2019 study concluded that those who spent 120 minutes or more outside per week reported positive effects on their general health.”

In Canada, doctors can now prescribe national park passes to patients as part of an effort to increase access to nature and its health benefits. This is great. Love it. But, hey, we need a prescription and can’t figure this out by ourselves anymore?

In other words, we have reached the point where a physician, a person who spent a decade training to keep human beings alive, can prescribe going outside as a medical intervention.

Not as a metaphor. Not as a joke. As an actual, documented, publicly funded health program.

And somewhere, in a research lab, a scientist published a paper whose findings can be summarized as follows: “Research has shown that if we sit less and move more, we live longer.”

Wow. Who knew. I’m glad somebody told me.

Here’s what I want to be precise about – because this is not a complaint about science, or researchers, or Canadian doctors, or podcast hosts who use their walks efficiently.

The research isn’t the problem. The prescriptions aren’t the problem. The two-things-at-once walk isn’t the problem.

They are the symptom. The problem is what had to happen first to an entire civilization before any of this became necessary.

We didn’t forget that nature was good for us because life got complicated. We didn’t stop sleeping because the nights got shorter. We didn’t lose the ability to sit in silence because silence became scarce.

We lost these things because we were taught – slowly, persistently, across generations – to distrust our own nature. To treat the body’s signals as inconveniences to be optimized around. To treat rest as laziness, stillness as unproductivity, time in nature as a luxury rather than a need. That’s what makes me speechless and leaves me puzzled.

You outsource your movement to a gym membership and a treadmill. You outsource your rest to a sleep protocol. You outsource your relationship with nature to a study that tells you how many minutes of outside time constitutes a therapeutic dose.

And then – this is the part that should stop us cold - you buy back a degraded version of what you already had. It’s degraded because it’s a repackage of something that existed before and it’s not authentic anymore.

The breathing book. The mindfulness app. The nature prescription. The new hot thing called NEAT movement, which means Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis, and basically stands for moving around like a normal human being.

We gave away the original. And we paid for the copy.

I don’t say this from a place of having figured it out. I say it from the place of someone who walked in silence and was told one day it was powerful.

And who understood, in that moment, that the gap between what felt ordinary to me and what felt remarkable to others was not a gap in personality or preference.

It was a gap in trust.

Trust in your own body. Your own instincts. Your own nature as a human being who needs silence and movement and trees and rest. Not as a wellness strategy, but as the basic operating conditions of being alive.

That trust didn’t disappear on its own.

It was taken, gradually, efficiently, profitably, by a world that discovered it could sell you back what you’d been convinced you no longer had.

The question isn’t whether you need a nature prescription or a breathing book or a sleep protocol.

The question for you is this: Why did you drift so far from yourself that you stopped trusting what you already knew?

If this landed… I built something for you.
A 7-Day-Challenge “I Walk as Myself”

If you are ready to stop sleepwalking and reconnect with the person you’ve been too busy to be….. you might want to look into this:

I want to walk as myself again