What 12 months of living in the country taught me
Yes, it's wholesome and lovely. But it goes deeper than that. It is strength training for the soul.
I have been a city girl all my life. I’ve lived in small cities and big cities. For five years I lived in a village, but a village is just a microcosm of a city — it’s high density and in your face, just like a metropolis, just with much smaller borders.
In late 2019, my partner and I decided to move to his old home, a few miles from the Irish Sea and about a dozen miles from an ancient mountain range called the Mournes that straddle the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. It’s a place where the sea almost always roars and the wind almost always blows. We told ourselves we’d try it for a year, fix up the house and then decide if we wanted to stay. Little did we know, when we moved in on 27 January 2020, that we were about to leave not just the city behind, but normal life as we have all known it.
Twelve months on, I can safely say living in an isolated, out-of-the-way place has been one of my life’s greatest blessings. In spite of all the upheaval in the outer world, I’ve flourished. Perhaps it’s not for everyone, but even the busiest, extrovert socialite should probably try it at least once. It is strength training for the soul.
All the stereotypical things are true: it’s peaceful, it’s beautiful and it’s wholesome.
But it also taught me how to be still. It removed from my psyche the propensity to wander, rootless, on to the next place. I have been moving from place to place my entire life, and moving became not just a means to an end but a coping mechanism and even a habit. And when I wasn’t moving, or planning a move, like many people I would want to fill my non-work days with activities and errands, going from here to there to pass the time and change the scenery. I would wake up in a small room in a small house or apartment, and immediately think: where can I go today? These days, I don’t even feel the need to leave my house — which is handy during a lockdown. Having space around me has given me internal permission to sit and watch the movement of sun from east to west, as I go about my work on the computer.
It’s taught me that environment matters. That living somewhere you can experience beauty just by turning your head or looking up from your desk has a direct, material impact on your mental health. For three years I lived along a busy road heavily used by trucks, with big box supermarkets the only commerce that was within walking distance. I used to suspect that I was just being precious, or overly sensitive when I felt overwhelmed by sadness most days. Turns out, I was responding to an ugly and sterile environment. Have you ever lived in a crappy apartment or a cold, dark, damp house? I have, many times. It’s a tough slog.
Also: my child is just nicer in the country. Most of the time I don’t even have to try to force him be nicer — he is just nicer. Years ago, when my son was still really little, I noticed that even an hour spent in a forest transformed him from an often recalcitrant child into an enthusiastic wood fairy with a very positive attitude. I grew up in Brooklyn, and I know that city life has its charms for kids. I remember the excitement of going to the Museum of Natural History on a class trip, or walking down Fifth Avenue at Christmas time. The city can be a great teacher if kids are still free to safely play unsupervised by adults with the chaos of a big city all around them. But I firmly believe that the fact that we live surrounded by fields is a large reason why my son has coped well with being on lockdown and losing an entire year of his social life. And it’s not like he’s out exploring the hedgerows from sun up to sun down like a latter-day Huck Finn. He’s still attached to screens most of the time. Just the fact that there’s a tree to climb out back, waiting for him should he want it, seems to be enough to counteract the ravages of the contemporary digitisation of childhood.
At the risk of sounding like a pseudo-druid, living out among fields and by-lanes has given me a different perspective on the passing of time; because, living out among fields and by-lanes, among the birds and sheep, reminds you in the loveliest way possible of your eternal insignificance.
Last year, as the time passed and we cycled through the seasons, I noticed the specific beauty of each month. In January it was the berries — bright red bullet points in a sea of mud. Then in February it was the crocuses. Spring brought one eruption of colour after another and the evenings began their long stretch into summer. The cherry blossoms blossomed, then fell. The blackberries did the same. Then the green leaves turned bright reds and yellows. Now they are gone.
This all happened as it has always happened, and I look forward to it happening all over again as each week passes.
Meanwhile, in the near distance the Mournes, mountains older than time itself, sit heavily over it all, sometimes lit up from a sunset red like Mordor, sometimes white with snow.
It’s not crushing, this reminder of your own smallness as nature gets on with doing her thing. It’s not a nihilism, a dark force whispering in your ear that there is no meaning and no point. It’s the opposite. It’s a reminder that as you think and feel and wish and plot and plan, nature just carries on. She is in no way concerned with your busyness. You are folded into her work, one living creature among many making its way on her turf; and this is reassuring, not isolating. It’s comforting, not alienating. When you stand wedged in among a hoard of strangers on a crowded subway train, lurching this way into an armpit and that way into a backpack, its easy to feel infringed upon, put upon, choked and trapped by the mass of bodies and flesh all around, each person with their own maddening opinions and needs and dreams.
When you live around more livestock than people, on a small island surrounded by rough seas, your daily battles are with mud and wind. The moon and the tide are always there to remind you of the cosmos. Within that open space, a healthy perspective takes hold.