Apart from one specific long-distance charity-walk challenge a few years ago, I don’t believe I’ve ever mentioned in the blog my walking and hiking in the local moorland and coastline and appreciation of the local bird-life / wild-life as my main mind-clearing activities.
It’s something I do.
It’s not something I re-present in language.
I post noisily, here and Twitter on anything and everything philosophical and political but only very occasionally post a picture or a report from the outdoors, or from a Sparrowhawk visit, and only on Facebook, just to family and friends. Local beach covered in Sanderlings these days. Dolphin pod not seen since early October. Lovely Twitter exchange overnight with a journalist identifying owl sounds outside their London window, from 300 miles away.
I post here now, because I suspect it’s going to become topical in brain-mind progress discussions how much we embody our philosophies as opposed to re-presenting them as academic objects. It’s already become popularly topical that walking in and access to a rural environment is important to mental health generally. But there’s more. How one embodies one’s philosophical take on life, the universe and everything IS one’s mental state – full stop. Nothing more, nothing less.
Mind<>World participation and identity is central to McGilchrist’s hemispheric hypothesis and many on the similar parallel thought journey(s) have their own meditative or mindfulness preferences.
For me that’s being part of the environment.
Experiencing the landscape,
the geography,
the weather,
the living
world.
(Here’s one I prepared earlier, from a little farther afield.)