Take any problem into a beautiful setting of nature and sit for a while. The clarity you find will show you how nature speaks.
You head out the door, and the problem comes along for the ride. The conversation that went sideways. The decision that won’t decide itself. You find a bench and sit down … and the problem sits down beside you. It rehearses. It replays. It circles back to make its case one more time. Most of us assume the beautiful setting is the point. A prettier place to work things out. Yet perhaps the point is the sitting. For a while. Long enough for the problem to run out of things to say.
Years ago, I carried a question to a rough stone bench in the Spruce Plot of the Morton Arboretum. I couldn’t even name it. Only a sense that something was being overlooked. So I sat. And sat. And then quietly stayed. Those spruce towered over me, older than any worry I had ever carried. They never did answer my question. What they offered instead was clarity of another kind. The problem settled back to its true size, and something I hadn’t gone looking for began reaching for me. That’s the quiet irony of “the clarity you find.” Well, we don’t actually find it. We get still enough for it to find us. To this day, that rough bench sitting humbly beneath the spruce continues to call me back. Nature, it turns out, has been speaking all along. We’re usually just too noisy to hear what it’s longing to say.
For further reflection
What problem have I kept inside that might be asking to come outside and sit with me for a while?