‘Short-term exposure to nature has a measurable beneficial impact on mental wellbeing,’ concluded Dr Andrea Mechelli, who had helped to lead the research.

Ecotherapy or ‘green care’ projects are on the rise. Many city farms and community gardens are now used for mental health work to lower stress, anxiety and depression. Of course, in many ways this is all acting on old advice: ‘Get yourself some fresh air.’ In 1859, in her Notes on Nursing, Florence Nightingale wrote that ‘after a closed room, what hurts them [patients] most is a dark room’ and advised that ‘it is not only light but direct sunlight they want’. Finally, evidence is catching up.

The trouble is, over half the world’s population now live in big cities. In 1950 more than two-thirds of the world’s population lived in rural settlements. Now, worldwide, most people live in urban areas. And, as people spend more time indoors than ever before, it’s clear that we aren’t existing much amid forests and under natural skies.

It’s time we started being more aware that the blues and greens of nature can help us. And the lives of children, too. More fresh air, more direct sunlight, maybe even if we are lucky the odd walk across fields and through forests. And perhaps also, armed with evidence, we can help to make the communal urban spaces we inhabit a bit more green and pleasant, too, so that everyone can benefit from nature, not just the lucky few.

The world inside

SO, YES, THE beauty of nature can heal. But in Ibiza, in 1999, I stood on top of a cliff near the villa where I was living, tucked into one of the quieter corners on the east of the island, and urged myself to jump.

I literally had no way of coping – or none that I could see – with the mental pain and confusion I was going through, and wished I had no one who cared about me, so I could just leave and disappear with minimal impact.

I sometimes think of that cliff edge. Of the scrubby grass I stood on, of the glittering sea I stared out at, and the limestone coastline stretching out. None of that, at the time, consoled me. Nature is shown to be good for us, but in the moment of crisis nothing helps. No view in the world could have made me feel any better in that moment of extreme invisible pain. That view won’t have changed much over two decades. And yet I could stand there now and feel its beauty, and feel so different to the terrified young man I had been.

The world affects us, but it isn’t quite us. There is a space inside us that is independent to what we see and where we are. This means we can feel pain amid external beauty and peace. But the flipside is that we can feel calm in a world of fear. We can cultivate a calmness inside us, one that lives and grows, and gets us through.

There is a cliché about reading. That there are as many books as there are readers. Meaning every reader has their own take on a book. Five people could sit down and read, say, The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin and have five totally different legitimate responses. It isn’t really about what you read, but how you read it. The writer might start a story but they need a reader for it to come alive, and it never comes alive the same way twice. The story is never just the words. It is also the reading of them. And that is the variable. That is where the magic lives. All a writer can do is provide a match, and hopefully a dry one. The reader has to strike the flame into being.

The world is like that, too. There are as many worlds as there are inhabitants. The world exists in you. Your experience of the world isn’t this objective unchangeable thing called ‘The World’. No. Your experience of the world is your interaction with it, your interpretation of it. To a certain degree we all make our own worlds. We read it in our own way. But also: we can, to a degree, choose what to read. We have to work out what about the world makes us feel sad or scared or confused or ill or calm or happy.

We have to find, within all those billions of human worlds, the one we want to live on. The one that, without us imagining it, would never arrive.

And, likewise, we have to understand that however it might influence them, the world is not our feelings. We can feel calm in a hospital, or in pain on a Spanish clifftop.

We can contradict ourselves. We can contradict the world. We can sometimes even do the impossible. We can live when death seems inevitable. And we can hope after we knew hope had gone.

You, unplugged LIFE CAN SOMETIMES feel like an overproduced song, with a cacophony of a hundred instruments playing all at once. Sometimes the song sounds better stripped back to just a guitar and a voice. Sometimes, when a song has too much happening, it’s hard to hear the song at all.

And like that overcrowded song we, too, can feel a bit lost.

Our natural selves haven’t changed in tens of thousands of years, and we should remember that, with every new app or smartphone or social media platform or nuclear weapon we design. We should remember the song of being human. To think of the air when we feel stuck underwater. To find some calm amid an age of saturated marketing and breaking news and the million daily jolts of the internet. To be unafraid of being afraid. To be our own brilliant, true, beautiful, fragile, flawed, imperfect, animal, ageing, wonderful selves, trapped in time and space, made free by our ability to stop, at any moment, and find something – a song, a sunbeam, a conversation, a piece of pretty graffiti – and feel the sheer improbable wonder of being alive.

18

EVERYTHING YOU ARE IS ENOUGH

‘There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self.’

—Aldous Huxley

Things that have almost always been

CLIFFS. TREE FERNS. Companionship. Sky. The man in the moon. The sentimentality of sunrises and sunsets. Eternal love. Dizzy lust. Abandoned plans. Regret. Cloudless night skies. Full moons. Morning kisses. Fresh fruit. Oceans. Seas. Tides. Rivers. Lakes as still as mirrors. Faces full of friendship. Comedy. Laughter. Stories. Myths. Songs. Hunger. Pleasure. Sex. Death. Faith. Fire. The deep silent goodness of the observing self. The light made brighter by the dark around it. Eye contact. Dancing. Meaningless conversation. Meaningful silence. Sleep. Dreams. Nightmares. Monsters made of shadows. Turtles. Sawfish. The fresh green of wet grass. The bruised purple of clouds at dusk. The wet crash of waves on slow-eroding rocks. The dark slick shine of wet sand. The gasping relief of a thirst quenched. The terrible, tantalising awareness of being alive. The now that for ever is made of. The possibility of hope. The promise of home.

What I tell myself when things get too much

1.It’s okay.

2.Even if it isn’t okay, if it’s a thing you can’t control, don’t try to control it.

3.You feel misunderstood. Everyone is misunderstood. Don’t worry about other people understanding you. Aim to understand yourself. Nothing else will matter after that.

4.Accept yourself. If you can’t be happy as yourself, at least accept yourself as you are right now. You can’t change yourself if you don’t know yourself.

5.Never be cool. Never try to be cool. Never worry what the cool people think. Head for the warm people. Life is warmth. You’ll be cool when you’re dead.

6.Find a good book. And sit down and read it. There will be times in your life when you’ll feel lost and confused. The way back to yourself is through reading. I want you to remember that. The more you read, the more you will know how to find your way through those difficult times.

7.Don’t fix yourself down. Don’t be blinded by the connotations of your name, gender, nationality, sexuality or Facebook profile. Be more than data to be harvested. ‘When I let go of what I am,’ said the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu, ‘I become what I might be.’

8.Slow down. Also Lao Tzu: ‘Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.’

9.Enjoy the internet. Don’t use it when you aren’t enjoying it. (Nothing has sounded so easy and been so hard.)

10.Remember that many people feel like you. You can even go online and find them. This is one of the most therapeutic aspects of the social media age. You can find an echo of your pain. You can find someone who will understand.

11.As Yoda nearly put it, you can’t try to be. Trying is the opposite of being.

12.The things that make you unique are flaws. Imperfections. Embrace them. Don’t seek to filter out your human nature.

13.Don’t let marketing convince you that happiness is a commercial transaction. As the Cherokee-American cowboy Will Rogers once put it, ‘Too many people spend money they haven’t earned, to buy things they don’t want, to impress people they don’t like.’

14.Never miss breakfast.

15.Go to bed before midnight most days.

16.Even during manic times – Christmas, family occasions, hectic work patches, city holidays – find some moments of peace. Retreat to a bedroom now and then. Add a comma to your day.

17.Shop less.

18.Do some yoga. It’s harder to be stressed out if your body and your breath isn’t.