The day is August 2nd. This is Manu writing in for the second of a thirty-part pop-up newsletter called Natural Conversation, inaugurated yesterday by my partner in crime Cody.
I’m out, walking the dog—I’m always out, walking the dog—and currently sitting on a bench, my back against the back wall of a centuries-old church, my sight set on the mountains right in front of me.
It’s another country, the one I’m looking at, but it feels all the same from up here. Mountains are mountains, trees are trees, the wind is blowing the clouds across the landscape, they see no borders beneath them. It’s a lovely view, and it’s the view you see in the picture right below.
Views have changed a lot in my life over the past 30-or-so years, both physically, since I moved a few times and at every step I got closer to the mountains and farther from the city, and also internally because the proximity to mountains and nature has had a profound impact on who I am as a person.
Growing up, I was not an outdoorsy kid, not in the traditional sense of the word, at least. I spent a lot of my childhood outside, but the outside was not the nature I have around me right now. It was the garden outside the house, a small patch of green surrounded by concrete. I was occasionally dragged (often against my will) up into the mountains or down to the sea, but it was not something I enjoyed. Spending time outside that way wasn’t particularly attractive to sub-ten-year-old me.
During my high school years, we left the city and moved to the countryside. The 100000 people city got replaced by a 4000 people town, concrete and asphalt left the place to fields and dirt roads, with the mountains looming out in the distant horizon. Spending time out in nature started to become enjoyable, but not very desirable. It was primarily a function of me having to go from place A to B and needing to move through a space that was mostly empty. I have fond memories of me cycling and walking through those roads, roads that I still occasionally walk these days (with my dog, because I’m always walking the dog).
Then I moved up here, now more than a decade ago. Fields and dirt roads got replaced by forests and trails. And with that also came a lot more silence, more walking, often uphills—both ways, like our parents and grandparents going to school back in the days.
With each move, the horizon broadened, the cramped, obstructed views of the city were replaced by the openness of the countryside and then subsequently replaced by the views I get to absorb every day now. The higher I go, the farther I get to see, but in a weird way, this lifelong move upwards has also changed me at a deeper, personal level: I’m getting more introspective, less interested in the chaos the city has to offer.
Maybe I changed, and I needed a landscape that reflected my views and my inner state or maybe it’s the other way around, and it’s the landscape that has changed me, for the better I might say. Or maybe it’s a mix of both. It probably is a bit of both. What I do know is that there’s no turning back, and the city will remain a distant memory from my early years.
— M