129 - Five Games That Will Change How You Notice Nature

0:00I wanted to start out with a confession. You know, there have been times I've been on entire walks, even hikes, where I got to the end and I realized, I think I could tell you a single thing that passed my way. Doesn't happen much anymore. But there have been times in the past, where I don't remember a bird, not a single plant. My legs did the walk and the rest of me just wasn't there at all. And the strange part of it is, I used to think that it was just how some people were built. I have 80 HD. I wander off all the time. Some folks notice stuff and other people don't notice stuff and that's just the way it goes and I kind of fell into that second group. But it turns out that's not true. Noticing is a skill. It's trainable and it's the same way that anything is trainable. I always say everything is figure outable, right? So today we're going to walk through some ways that I've been training to get my own concentration and focus in place and some methods that I've read about in various books and articles.

1:04But you could go along with it and probably a few embarrassing stories along the way. One of the things that I want to get across, that when we have a lot of time, not just in nature, but just in our day to day lives, is that we get to the beginning of a trailhead and we go out on the trailhead and then we get back to the car. Some people are just trying to get their steps in. They're just trying to get some exercise. There's nothing wrong with that if that's your purpose in that. There's a different way that you can be outside. Different way that you can be present outside and take things in and notice the difference between those experiences. When you just go for a walk to get your steps in, it's a much smaller experience than it is when you're trying to take in a lot more than just that. It also makes that walk so much more enjoyable. It takes your mind off of, I got 20 minutes to go, kind of thing, or I have two miles

2:04to go. So today, there's a handful of simple games that you can play by yourself or with someone else so that you start actually training your brain to notice things. And along the way, we'll talk about sometimes where you can miss something really obvious about that. So first of all, there are times when I go for a walk, like I said, and I've just missed whatever it is. I have gone to someplace just absolutely beautiful and then you're like reminding yourself, chill, focus. This is amazing. There were times when I was in Hawaii. I had to go to Hawaii for work and we had some extra time after work and on weekends. And I'd go for walks and I would realize that my mind was three million miles away. And you're like, dude, you're in Hawaii. It's amazing here. You don't live like this. You're surrounding is nothing like this. So could this end. But instead, you might have a bird that flew over your head and you never saw it or a plant

3:05that was blooming along the way and you just walked past it. It was funny, mom. At one point I got bit by a centipede and we were far away from any sort of pharmaceutical company. And so my coworker looked at it and said, here, we should grab some aloe and put it on your finger. So it stops swelling. And I said, yeah, but where are we going to get some aloe? We're not anywhere near a pharmacy. And my friend, my coworker, points around, she's like, aloe's everywhere. Oh, aloe grows here. I completely miss that, right? Funny. So anyway, the pattern is, as like I said, when you start noticing, you're not noticing. Then you start realizing that you're missing out on something the whole time. You think about, you know, something about a task. You're thinking about a conversation you're replaying in your head. You're thinking about work the next day. You're planning something, you know, three weeks from now that you need to get done. Your head is somewhere else, right? Your eyes are open. They're pointed at the trail and your brain is just going somewhere that is not here.

4:10So the thing I noticed about all of this is that noticing isn't just a nice bonus skill for hobbyists, right? It's a difference between walking through your whole life and actually being in your life, being involved in your life. And sometimes I'm out with my friend, and the two of us spot something and we really see it. We don't just sit there and glance at it. There's something very alive about the whole situation I talked about in my sub-stack about how we were going along this marsh area and there's a river that kind of cuts through it. And on the other side, there was this eagle. And so we stopped. We looked at it. We stared at 20 minutes. This eagle was just sitting there on something. We didn't know what it was. It turned out it was a fish. And other birds were mobbing it, trying to get it to go away. And the eagle didn't care. We were like, is the eagle injured? Is something wrong? It turned out the eagle was just tired because this fish it had was huge and so he was bringing

5:12it back to his babies in the nest. And we just watched it. And it was dramatic. It was interesting. But we were soaking it in, being present in that moment. And if we hadn't been paying attention, we wouldn't have noticed it at all. This last week, we were back at that same marsh. And my friend, who has amazing eyes, by the way, she and I were pretty, but she saw a whooping crane flying on the horizon. Sure enough, whooping crane. Pulled out the binoculars, absolutely a whooping crane. But you have to notice that kind of thing because it was way off in the horizon. It wasn't a place that we had seen the whooping crane there before. But you had to pay attention to this little white dot off in the horizon. It's not the binoculars and you get to see it. It's basically any time you go for a walk, any time you do something, whether you're in your backyard and you're just mowing the lawn or you're on a dedicated birding trip or you're just out for a nature walk.

6:13The only variable that exists in all of this is whether you're actually looking at anything. And so a lot of us assume that when we get used to being around nature that someday, we'll slow down, we'll be present, we'll start noticing things. I'll notice things when I have more time. I'll notice things when I just don't have so many things in my brain. And I'll have a different quality of attention in me because I'll be older or more mature. I can tell you now that never happens. The good news is, it doesn't mean that you have to change your schedule. You just need a little bit of practice. Anybody can get better at noticing things. So I have these five different exercises that I like to walk you through so that you can do them, like I said, either alone or with a couple of people with you. So the first one's called a color hunt. And before you go out, pick just one color and notice how many shades of it that you noticed on your walk.

7:14Like I noticed, I tend to notice green a lot. Well, there's that green of the tree and then the green of the grass and then the green in the marsh and the green in the water. And you start just noticing that color as your landscape changed. And so you stop seeing green as one of those just flat things and you're not even considering it. You start noticing how many different kinds of greens you actually see. The second thing is something that my friend and I started a while ago and it's called a sit spot. And the idea of a sit spot is that you pick one spot and you go back to it regularly. Same time of day, if you can manage it, manage it week after week, month after month. And maybe you just spend five minutes there. That's plenty to start with. But what you're training is noticing how this one spot changes over time. The small differences from one visit to the next. And so I got into this habit in this marsh that I noticed all along the way that there are markers of how deep the water is. And when we were having flooding rains, that marker got way up there.

8:17And now this last time, it's been a little dry. I drove by it. And so every single time I take a picture of that marker and I notice where it's at. But even the same marsh that we've been at, some years it's muddy and there's a lot of shorebirds at it. Some years it's flooded and there are a lot of ducks in it and the ducks are swimming around. And some years it is so dry and low that predators can just walk over the dry land. And there's neither shorebirds nor ducks on it. So if you go to the same place time and time again, you'll start to notice new things about it and they can maybe even get it like a journal and jot some of those things down. The next one is called sound mapping and this one's interesting and I'm not very good at it but I'm trying to do better about it. It's where you can close your eyes for just a minute and count how many distinct sounds you can hear so that you're sitting there around you. And so it's shocking actually when you start to do this, how much your brain filters out

9:17for you on a normal day. Your brain is really good at tuning things out so that you could focus on the things that's most important. It means about you doing a really good job at whatever it is you're doing. While I've been sitting here in this chair recording podcasts, there was an ambulance outside. I heard some kid yelling and like playing and laughing outside. But my brain tunes it out because I'm trying to focus on doing this podcast. But when you sit there for just a moment and you just hear the things around you, you'll start noticing more and more a really distant bird. This last time when I was out at the marsh, I said, I'm hearing this weird clicking noise and I don't know what it is. But I think I recall that bitterns make this clicking noise and then all of a sudden, least bittern. So you start getting good at it and you start recognizing these noises but you can hear the wind whistling through the trees.

10:19You can hear the wind going across the marsh and it's really kind of an incredible experience. So if you get a chance to do it, this one, like I said, for me, takes the most amount of time. Then you can play though what's missing game and this one is a good one for like a spot that you visit often. Maybe you're sit spot. So instead of asking what's new, there's what is called a fenn, not too far from my house. And what's incredible about the fenn is it's basically a marsh that's created through spring water and little tiny fairy plants grow in it. It looks like a magical fairy that you place that you would see in a movie's kind of thing. And one time I just saw these little pink flowers and I had never seen them before. And so now, like I said, it's easy to ask yourself what's new. All those little pink flowers are new. But what's missing and you know what was missing is that there were a number of trees that were up and we had a wind storm and those trees are now on the ground.

11:20They got knocked out. They weren't missing missing, but they weren't where they used to be. So this is really what we try to do. It's looking to see exactly what is is not there now. And it's as hard as trying to notice what's new. Then there's a field journaling, which is not about noticing, but about recording. It's not really for you to worry about keeping a tidy log of everything. It's just for you to be able to describe something enough so that you can write it down. And then you know, you can't just say like bird and call it done, but you want to notice some details about it. What bird is it? Is it, you know, is it a, like we noticed this last time? I did a couple of podcasts ago. The migration is already underway. And so when my friend and I went out to the marsh, the yellow blackbirds are gone. The yellow worblers are gone. The rosebeaks, I didn't see a one of them. And so for journaling, that is about writing those kinds of things down in a way that you

12:24can look at it maybe next year at this time and say, well, wait, you know what, the yellow worblers aren't gone yet. It's a little bit different than it was last year. But those kinds of noticing activities will help you become better. So like I said, this is about taking a quit pause. A couple of games right here. If you're walking in a city, there's another game I'll tell you about it. I call it the numbers game. So what you try to do is do numbers. So you go for a walk in your city and you try to find the number one. Okay, found the number one. Now try to find the number two. And you keep walking around town until you get all the way up to zero and then you start over again. So I, it's a numbers noticing game that you can play too. These types of games to just help you notice the things around you. You know, pick one that sounds the most like fun, I guess, for you and just try it once. Just see if it helps you out. You know, maybe you're not in a position where you can close your eyes, then pick one of

13:25the other ones. But if you're at a bench, maybe you're a sit spot and you want to just close your eyes for just a minute to just see what kinds of sounds you hear. It's pretty amazing when you focus on that. So once I started noticing, it was really changed for me is that I became more observant about it. I catch myself now, you know, mid walk. I'll notice something that I never noticed before. I'll be like, is that how always been there? And then I look back in some of my photographs and it was there all the time. I never noticed it. But now when I find myself fading away or I find myself not paying attention, I'm able to pull myself back in again. You know, not to be strict or disciplined, but in a gentle way. Okay, you know, we're on this walk. You'll have all week to sit there and think about your laundry. Let's get our mind back to this. Let's focus on where we're doing. And the walks where I do this, even a little bit, they feel better.

14:25They feel more rich. I enjoy them better and I focus less on, you know, my knees hurt or did I get enough steps in or something like that. It's not because like I said, they're longer or more productive. They're just fuller. They're more enjoyable. They're my stress levels go down more. And I start just noticing everything around me instead of just walking through space. And the whole case for all of this is not so that you can become some kind of naturalist, which you could, but just so that you experience more of what's already available to you, it's already there right in front of you. You don't need any special equipment for any of this and you don't need to, you know, change how you do everything overnight. Just like I said, pick one of these games that we listed from today as a strategy and try them out on your next walk, maybe a short walk or maybe while you're mowing the lawn. That's my big thing is when I go and mow the lawn, I fuzz out.

15:26I put headphones on and I am in Jill's happy place while I mow the lawn because I don't like mowing the lawn. And then you realize I'm really missing out on noticing things in my own backyard. If you have a story like that, I'd love to hear it for you. And so if you're interested in learning more, the thing that got me kicked off on this whole idea is there is a book called The Art of Noticing, 131 Ways to Spark Creativity, Find Inspiration and Discover Joy in Every Day by Rob Walker. This is a book that got me kicked off on it. There were some also naturalist videos that talked about its spaces and stuff like that. I think it will greatly enrich your life, not just your naturalist life or not just your outdoor adventure life, but every aspect of your life. You can find everything I do at JillfromTheNorthwoods.com. I'd love to hear from you. And you can email me at NorthwoodsJill at fastmail.com. Thanks so much for listening and I can't wait to see you next week.