Hope

A friend and I were talking the other day about the tangible, positive effects of walking outside. I guess we were also talking about hope.

My friend described how swiftly his outlook changes when he steps out the door and strides down his street, towards the horizon. He feels more grounded, more alive somehow. He notices things around him – nature catches his eye – and he becomes more than an observer: through his senses, he encounters the world for real. And in so doing, he feels more real, more involved. I totally get this. If I’ve been feeling down or mixed-up, I go outside and something shifts. The difficult emotions don’t necessarily go away; but in that moment, I’ve given myself something to do: put one foot in front of another, and that’s enough. It’s doable. And within minutes, my sense of perspective has reset itself and the world seems different.

When we’ve got our faces fixed firmly towards our screens, inhaling the news and divisive opinions, then it’s really easy to lose sight of ourselves – and in the process, lose sight of hope. We gradually feel less visible and more powerless. What's worse - we fail to see it’s happening: the hopeless feeling becomes normal… and when it’s normal, when the internet is our only way of encountering the world and each other, then we don’t name it. We don’t know it’s there, pulling us down (and our faces are literally pointing downwards to read our screens). Looking through the one-way window of the internet is a choice. It’s not the only normal! It’s just one very narrow, relatively inconsequential way of doing things.

My friend and I agreed there is an equally easy remedy. Hope is found outside. It doesn’t matter where you live – what matters is what happens to you when you are out and about, walking forwards. You look up, first of all. But then you start to look around, to let things catch your eye. It’s what nature writer Simon Barnes calls “the vision of the unconscious mind” – becoming more aware that your mind is taking in a whole lot more than just what’s twelve inches away from your face.

When you go outside and walk, you use more of your brain. You might not be thinking deep and meaningful thoughts – you might be writing a shopping list in your head, it doesn’t matter. But while you’re thinking, the rest of your mind is doing a whole lot more because you’re moving. Studies have shown that simply being in nature lowers our stress hormone, cortisol; and that the more time we spend in nature, the less likely we are to experience anxiety or depression (ref: Dr Radha Modgil, ‘Country Walking’ magazine).

Academic Iain McGilchrist writes about two elements of the animal mind: one part focused forward on finding food and seeking direction and reward; and another part that wants to understand the bigger picture, the surrounding environment, the whole context that we exist in. And it’s that second part – the part that seeks out the big picture – that gives us humans a sense of how everything is knitted together, bringing meaning, bringing hope.

When I go outside and walk forwards, I’m looking after both parts of my mind. My forward-moving body satisfies the part of my mind seeking a single focus, while my roving senses start to take in the world around me so that I am not just me; I am actually part of a bigger picture, instead of being a helpless observer.

I’ve written before about how I personally experience the effects of walking outside: how my thoughts start to untangle and unfurl, like ribbons on the string of a kite flying out freely, playing in the sky. When I’m sitting still at a desk, my thoughts are like a crowd of people all trying to cram through a door at once. But just moving forwards puts me in a frame of mind that welcomes my thoughts, and is able to listen to them one at a time. It’s as if my thoughts know their place when I’m outside, and subsequently I’m happier to meet them.

As for those lucky days when you get to walk through beautiful places, you might experience a different kind of overwhelm: being in awe of your surroundings. Awe is right there, just out of the corner of your eye, folded into pockets of air, all around you… and when you notice it, you begin to feel that you’re part of the surroundings as well, part of the whole; you’re small, temporary, insignificant, but terribly vital too. There’s a deep sense of relief when you put yourself into perspective: you feel humble, but not humiliated. In these awesome moments, the world is happening to you… instead of you seeking it out, awe finds you and sets you free. In one of my favourite poems, R.S. Thomas described being on a moor and finding “stillness of the heart’s passions… I walked on, simple and poor, while the air crumbled and broke on me generously as bread”.

Our instinctive draw to awe is why being in big, open spaces is so good for us… the local park, the hills, the seaside. The depth of the vista around my relatively tiny body helps me relate to the world, not just view it through a window or screen; and if I’ve walked a few miles or so, then my breathlessness and aching limbs remind me – tired, mortal and hopeful – that I’m an integral part of the picture.

References:

Simon Barnes – ‘Rewild Yourself’ (Simon & Schuster, 2018)

Iain McGilchrist – ‘The Master and his Emissary’ (Yale, 2018)

Country Walking magazine (October 2026 edition)

R.S. Thomas – ‘The Moor’, in ‘Selected Poems 1946-1968’ (Bloodaxe, 1986)