The centipede who moved a mountain
How engaging with nature influenced me subtly but significantly
In my recent article, I outlined our year-long curation of the best educational environments for our daughters. Eventually, we arrived at the simplest of answers — nature. Not only has nature schooling become an essential part of our travel education journey but we have also actively tried to reduce the boundaries between ourselves and nature in day-to-day activities. Most of it happens by simply giving our girls as much outdoor time as possible. This takes an effort on my part because I’m not naturally athletic, never have been but I love walks, strolls through the woods, an occasional jog, and pristine beaches.
More commonly though, we find ourselves indoors and still engaging with elements of nature closely. My daughters love playing with water. They love goofing around with water in my kitchen utensils pretending they are concocting a delicious soup. My younger daughter especially likes to wash everything — from her hands to crayons to her stuffed toys — for hours! Previously, I would not have paid attention to what happens to the water after it has been played with. Usually it gets dumped straight into a sink because I’m more keen to find a towel to dry her up as quickly as I can lest she catches a cold. In contrast, since we started engaging proactively with nature, I find myself conscientiously teaching my girls to water the plants instead.
Once we begin spending time in nature, it is impossible not to love her, care for her and protect her.
Yet I had the most touching realisation of the influence nature has had on me, when we lived in Thailand for a month. In Oct-Nov. last year, we rented a gorgeous Airbnb with a large garden and patio in Chiang Mai. To our surprise, each morning when we arrived for breakfast on the patio, we were greeted by several centipedes crawling away on the floor. They seemed too focussed to bother us, almost as if busily taking their usual route to work. In the beginning, despite being conscious of them, we invariably crushed a couple of them under our slippers. Slowly, we became better at navigating safely, even my then-two-year-old daughter. Eventually, after almost two weeks of cohabiting this space with these quiet, harmless beings, I noticed that I had begun to tread slowly and carefully, feeling for anything that may have been caught under my slipper before placing the full weight of my body. To watch for some innocent little thing caught under my feet and allow it a chance to live, simply by pausing and thinking, comes across as a gross inefficiency in the beginning, especially to those of us accustomed to a busy, urban life. But this minor inefficiency has put me back in touch with a simple kindness that makes us human. We usually pay no attention to our style or pace of walking, let alone its impact on a trivial insect. Yet this tiny change in attention is on another level, a leap from casual unkindness to intentional kindness.
Reducing the boundaries between nature and us has taught me to walk lightly, slowly and mindfully. As for real impact, at least one hapless centipede was able to escape without getting crushed under my step. In doing so, it remained unaware of the mountain it moved within me.
