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?Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed. We simply need that wild country? as part of the geography of hope.?
Wallace Stegner in Wilderness, America?s Living Heritage
The last time I wrote in this space, it was about paddling in springtime and the necessity of living lighter, more in the moment, in order not to brood on the relative inevitability of the unpleasantness of aging, that whole business of going north of 60, as it were, and decrepitude. With two more turns past on the seasonal wheel, and the drama of Algonquin in high autumn faded, snow has replaced the flaming neon golds and reds. Winter is a good time to reflect.
Being older is starting to mean different things. Generativity. A big word. It covers a lot of territory. A few of my close friends are becoming grandparents. Watching this transition is like watching a kid get the keys to the candy store ? only better. One of them said, in an unguarded moment: ?I?m ready to die now.? Which sounded at first maudlin and way too sad, but upon reflection just meant that he felt fulfilled to the very soles of his feet: Life has bestowed all her riches upon him.
Which is sort of how the empty nest is feeling to me. I went paddling in the fall with one of my young-adult offspring. The other, being in Paris, was not available. Their more-or-less permanent absence from the family home had been something I feared. The empty nest, I had heard (and imagined) was forlorn and sad and way too quiet.
My experience is not precisely that. First off, when the fledglings do come home to the nest, they twitter and cheep for more food in the fridge, they leave their stuff all over the nest, and it?s hard for them to add scintillating conversation to the mix since they?re always either out or sleeping. The house is very quiet in their absence, Peaceful. Tidy. But who knows really, since we hardly every come home except to sleep. One of the by-products of the empty nest is the grownups flying the coop ? together. We got really lucky and stayed madly in love with each other through almost 25 years of child-rearing and career-building.
But the big payoff of the empty nest is that my children have grown into young adults who are fun to be with. Getting together with young adult offspring when they choose it is an experiment in the nurturing going both ways: They make the picnic lunch, they cook the dinner, they paddle harder and farther and faster than us. Who are these strong young people? Having completed the job of parenting, one looks back and wonders what worked. Mostly I have no clue whether the stuff I did was right or wrong, save for being pretty sure that there?s no such thing as too much love.
But one thing I do know is that there?s also no such thing as too much nature. When I watch my grown kids in nature, I see them stand taller, they smile more than in the city, and calmness finds them. At a time when children are being exposed less and less to nature, mine got lucky that way. I raised my kids without TV or video games, because I wanted them to be readers. But something else happened: They went outside to play.
Recent research shows that the amount of time American children spend outside has declined by 50% in the last two decades. On average, children spend 5.5 hours a day using some kind of electronic device. Do we need to worry about this? What are the consequences of kids spending so much time on keyboards and touch screens, and so little time outside?
Author Richard Louv answered that question in his provocative book Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder. Louv argues that children pay a high price for humanity?s increasing alienation from nature ? attention difficulties and higher rates of physical and emotional illnesses. He cites a major study (by the California Department of Education and the American Institutes for Research) which showed that sixth graders involved in outdoor-based school programs improved their math and science scores by 27 per cent and were more cooperative, more engaged in the classroom and more open to conflict resolution.
Louv also cites studies that show a link between nature deficit and stress, and that demonstrate that the converse is true: Time in nature reduces stress. And he argues that children who grow up without spending significant time in nature develop ?ecophobia,? which means they associate nature with fear and apocalypse rather than joy and wonder; hence their inability and apparent paralysis about fixing the environment.
Who knew how important it was going to be to get my kids outside? Early on in their lives as canoeists in particular and outdoor-people I general, I got a whiff of how much of the child-training burden Mother Nature could take off my shoulders, because she is whiz-bang at teaching logical consequences: You paddle the canoe, it moves forward. You don?t paddle, it doesn?t go. You collect the wood and make the campfire, you get dinner. Otherwise you go hungry. In nature there aren?t plugs to power electronic substitutes for one?s own effort. Activity replaces passivity. These lessons in natural consequences are a dime a dozen when you play outside, and I watched them build character.
But Mother Nature?s most important gift is peace. We live in anxious times, and many of us have trouble calming our minds. Getting my mental hamster off that spinning wheel is not easy. But get outside, and the hamster hops off the wheel. For Mother Nature is the original anxiety buster. Getting kids ? and adults ? outside to play is natural Atavan and Paxil, in one easy-to-swallow ?pill,? with only good side effects.
Joanne Kates is Director of Camp Arowhon, Algonquin Park (www.camparowhon.com)
This was originally published in The Globe and Mail
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