I’ve begun experimenting with ChatGPT more, using it to summarise, look for patterns, and rummage through the dark abyss of my folders of notes for useful quotes and ideas. It’s like a handy assistant rather than a replacement scribe, and the more I use it the more I can see how A.I is going to join climate change as the great global transformers of the 21st Century.

Meanwhile, on the tiny scrap of rewilding ground outside my shed at home the cow parsley is wilting and fading, baby birds are feeding and fledging, and my recently planted willow twigs have bloomed into tiny trees. Some things change, some things never do, others change constantly as they go round and round.

This week I’ve been mulling over the problems of place blindness, thinking of ways to try to counter it, and wondering what the benefits of that might be.

I get a far richer satisfaction from looking out of my shed window these days than I did when the ground was a neatly groomed lawn that I never noticed. I was blind to the place where I spent most of my waking hours. And I was so accustomed to the idea that ‘garden sheds sit on garden lawns’ that it took me years before I saw the potential for letting it run a little wilder and to see things differently.

We often assume that all the wild places and all the wonderful places are far away from our own familiarity. This is known as the paradise complex, the idea that the perfect place is just over there, and that we’d be happy if only we could move to where the grass is a wee bit greener than it is here.

I was so place blind, for so long, that I devoted years of my life to figuring out ways to spend as long as possible as far away as possible! Indeed, I was still pretty belligerently positive that ‘home = boring’ as recently when I began spending a whole year exploring my local map!

Over the course of that year I learned that the landscape I live on was not as built-up as I thought. There was much more countryside than I had realised. But going out once a week to explore a new grid square on my map also opened my eyes to how damaged our natural world is.

Paying attention was changing my perspectives.

Many of the environmental problems I began learning about were the result of too many people being place blind, like me, for too long. Not appreciating the landscape, and not caring for how local environments were being mis-treated or over-exploited. Disconnection and neglect go hand in hand.

1. Look closer to home for your next microadventure.
   Ride to a grid square you’ve never visited on your local map.
   Walk a lap of your town rather than the country park you always visit at the weekend.
   Run a one-person marathon round your local 7 Summits rather than paying loads to travel to a distant race.
   Think smaller and simpler. Look around you. What can you do in your lunch break?
   Climb a tree, make coffee in the woods, swim in a river… You can always do something.
2. Pay attention.
   Try drawing a map of somewhere from memory, then get out on the ground to do it again – and perhaps discover how little you actually know about your familiar stomping grounds.
   Think about how you can make a positive impact on your environment, get out there and do it, and then share your successes and how it makes you feel on social media to encourage others to do the same.

Topophilia describes love for a place. Connecting more deeply with where you live, appreciating it for good and ill, and committing to both exploring it and improving it, can help enrich your life and your wellbeing. Being part of something greater than ourselves feels great.

Paradise does not lie over the next horizon, at the end of the rainbow. It lies within your decision to appreciate the imperfections of where you live, to revel in the mundane, and choose to find joy in the here and now.

Are you lucky or unlucky with where you happen to live? Much of the luck factor is in your head. Imagine you’re waiting in a queue in the bank when suddenly a robber bursts in, guns blazing, and you’re shot in the arm. Is that lucky or unlucky?

People who consider themselves unlucky in life say this whole event is enormously unlucky and that “unlucky things always happen to me.” Lucky people, however, prefer to report that it could have been much worse – they could have died – and that “I now have a great story to tell people.” In doing so they feel better about their lives, which keeps their future expectations high, which in turn means they are more likely to continue living a lucky life.

You say tomato, I say tomato…

Consciously being aware of our own place blindness is an important step towards rekindling our curiosity and reconnecting with the land. It’s yet another reminder that the mindset of how you approach adventure is far more important than the geography of where you go.

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