The Wildist: Why We Need to Live On The Wild Side
By
4 months ago
Walk like an animal, talk like an animal
Country & Town House’s Editor-at-Wild on what we can learn from the animal world.
The Wildist on Building Wild Habits
It sounds like a cliché after Covid to link everything back to ‘connecting with nature’, but over the past few years this phrase has come to mean more to me than a few seconds simply admiring the trees.
I have developed a yearning to emulate animalistic wild habits in my daily routine. If I am feeling overloaded or aware that my schedule is derailing under the mad juggle of life, I do two things. First, I breathe like a whale – deeply, expunging all of the air from my lungs until empty, holding my breath there at the bottom. Eventually I take long breaths in and out, expanding lungs and body with air, and without air, ensuring that my entire bloodstream has time to take on the cellular oxygenation. I shift my body closer to how an animal might recover their breath after moving at speed.
Second, I imagine what a female leopard or tiger would do in my situation. I picture how they start their day, carefully observing their surroundings, noting any tiny movements, sounds, changes in nature’s patterns, before making a single move. Once the land is safe and scoured, the cats warm up slowly in the sun instead of flicking a switch to heat up instantly. Only then do they stretch, and hunt. Nature’s journey is slow, but its success is fast. Just imagine if we began our day from this observatory position instead of the shrill alarm and chaos of our immediate daily life.
The amount of time predators sit or flow in stillness, to better balance out their incredible speed in hunt mode, is significant. We exist in a constant energy frenzy and technically aided modern hunt mode. How do we imagine we can be sustainably successful without instilling daily concentrated calm? Calm for me takes effort. I am especially mindful of nature’s maternal style: no helicopter parenting to be seen, movements always slow, strong, knowing and considered, no fuss or mad rushing from pillar to post. Operating one mission at a time, tuning into senses one at a time, using gloriously created bodies in their full energetic spectrum, daily.
If only in life we were more like leopards…
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