Nature is the slice of freedom we didn’t know we had

COMMENT: Working in the City of London, life couldn’t have felt busier than it did prior to March 2020. Five days a week, I joined the throng of fellow commuters travelling straight from home to train to office, then all the way back again. The other two days? Catching up on life admin, doing the food shop, going to the gym, winding down in front of the telly. Indoors. For me and, I think, for many of us leading busy working lives, the great outdoors was something of a corridor: a space that we’d pass through on our way to the next inside space. Not because we were actively rejecting a connection with nature, but simply because we didn’t have the time to make one. We moved, blinkered, from inside space A to inside space B, simply because those were the spaces where our busy lives were happening. The places outside our four walls barely crossed our minds. That was until the first lockdown arrived in the UK and we no longer had the choice of where to spend our time. When the indoors was forced upon us, the outside world suddenly seemed that little bit more important.  An hour of escape For many during that lockdown – particularly those struggling with mental health – the hour of outdoor exercise we were permitted was a lifeline. An hour of certainty and control. An hour of escape. A small, but very meaningful, slice of freedom that we’d never really fully valued, or even noticed.  I would go out on my daily walk and see families playing, laughing, having fun simply because that was all they could do, clinging to those 60 minutes of freedom before heading back to their indoor lives. Our limited time with nature became sacred and precious, and many of us prioritised it in a way that we never really had before.  Simply put, I think those restrictions on our lives have fuelled us with the desire to step out and appreciate nature. Where it once was a corridor we travelled through on our way to our busy indoor lives, the great outdoors is a place where we now spend some of our most human moments. We use it as a social space to connect with much-missed loved ones, a break-out space to escape from the stresses of the working day, a space to walk or run or read or think.  I don’t think this affinity for outside time has faded with the easing of restrictions. Nature and fresh air have become a healthy priority in our personal lives, and one I’m glad to see being carried through into our professional lives as well.  Walk and talk Many of my colleagues now choose to hold their catch-ups outside – ‘walk and talk Wednesday’, as one team calls it – and those who travel to the office spending more of their commute on foot, myself included. While it’s a two-hour walk, I travel to work on foot when I can and get to see the sun rising over Hyde Park: a serene start to the day.  Plants, living walls, terraces, and other snippets of nature are also now sitting pride of place in our own post-pandemic workspaces, as well as the ones we have been refurbishing and developing for our clients too. Little glimpses of the outside world we’ve become so connected to; reminders of the times some of us clung to nature as our lifeline. When the pandemic is over and our memories of those times fade, perhaps our affinity for the great outdoors will fade with it. But until then, nature will remain a significant and healthy part of life for many of us; and it will always be that little slice of freedom we didn’t know we had, until it was all we had. Melanie Olrik is a partner at Hollis