The Well Gardened Mind

As we cultivate the earth, we cultivate an attitude of care towards the world but a caring stance is not generally promoted in contemporary life. The ‘replace’ rather than ‘repair’ culture, combined with fragmented social networks and the fast pace of urban living has given rise to a set of values that devalues care. In fact, we have moved so far from placing care at the centre of our lives, that it has become, as the environmentalist and social activist Naomi Klein recently observed, a ‘radical idea’.

This is not only about values – there are realities to the world that many of us live in that work against these impulses. Our machines have become far too complex for most of us even to think about repairing them, and we have become used to all the immediate feedback and ‘likes’ we get through our smartphones and other devices. There is a devaluing of the slower rhythms of natural time, not only of plants but of our bodies and minds. These rhythms do not fit with the ‘quick fix’ mentality that has come to dominate so much of modern life.

These pressures express themselves as a demand for treatment packages and programmes that promise fast results, as if it were possible to speed-dial mental health. Whilst identifying faulty thinking or misplaced feelings can help us to understand a problem so that it immediately becomes less troubling, it will still take many months to lay down the neural pathways that accompany lasting change. In situations that are more complex, we not only have to wait for things to grow, we first have to reach the point where we really want things to grow because the prospect of change, however much we might think we want it, almost always makes us very anxious.

The most popular metaphor in use for the brain these days is the computer, which only encourages the idea that there is a quick fix to be had. The physical structure of the brain is likened to hardware, the mind to software and terms such as ‘program’, ‘module’, and ‘app’ are applied to its functioning. The undeveloped infant brain is even sometimes likened to a database waiting for data to be keyed in. This brain-as-computer metaphor is woefully misleading, not least in the idea that it is possible to separate our hardware from our software. The two are in fact so intimately related as to be effectively indivisible. Our experiences, thoughts and feelings are constantly giving shape to our neural networks and they in turn are influencing how we think and feel. But the real problem with the brain-as-computer metaphor is that it renders us unnatural.

We have separated ourselves from nature to such an extent that we forget we are part of a vast and living continuum, that the atoms in our bodies are derived from the products of the earth and that in time they will slip back into the chain of life. This continuity between us and the natural world is not only in death, for even as we go about our day-to-day lives, the skin we shed is turning to dust and the carbon dioxide we expire is contributing to the growth of plants. Although we live in a technological age and hide behind our machines, our difficulty with assimilating this kind of understanding is not a modern phenomenon. The naturalness of death does not come intuitively to us and probably never has. It is simply that we have found stronger and more sophisticated ways of distancing ourselves from it.

The garden is a place that brings us back to the basic biological rhythms of life. The pace of life is the pace of plants; we are forced to slow down and the feeling of safe enclosure and familiarity helps shift us to a more reflective state of mind. The garden gives us a cyclical narrative too. The seasons come round again and we have a sense of return; some things are altered, some things stay the same. The structure of seasonal time has consolations. Kinder to the psyche, it lets you learn because you get second chances. If something fails this year, you know you can try again at the same time next year.

Linear time is more uncompromising and its finite quality is harder to live by – like an arrow on a fixed trajectory that doesn’t recognise our bodies’ need for rest and recovery or that the land needs this too. When everything is about utilising time for maximum output, we become preoccupied with not wasting time and feel we don’t have enough time. We end up trying to live by a clock that we are always trying to beat.

Living life as a series of buzzes and adrenalin rushes can easily become addictive and an underlying exhaustion, paradoxically, makes the pattern harder to break. This can turn into a way of escaping from problems rather than sorting them out, making it easier to keep up the pace rather than slow down and take stock.

In this age of fast food, speed dating, 1-click ordering and same-day delivery – the quicker all manner of needs are satisfied the better. The endless stream of posts, notifications, emails and tweets require us to absorb so much new information that it is hard to assess what might be relevant. There is a lack of time to digest experience, understand, or even remember it, for our individual and collective memories are increasingly outsourced to the Cloud.

Our sense of time passing is closely linked to the amount of memory the brain lays down. Time spent in new places or in situations that require us to notice a lot of detail always seems to last longer – because we are laying down more memories. By contrast time spent on the Internet flies by, for it does not require the same kind of attention and we are not laying down memories.

Our autobiographical timeline is composed of memories but our sense of time elapsed is often hazy. This is because memory has a much stronger relationship to place than it does to the chronology of the clock. It is why we are often unsure about how long ago something happened but invariably know where it happened. Our remote ancestors living in the wild needed to map terrain and recall the whereabouts of resources, so there are evolutionary reasons why location might function as something like an index card to the memory system. In consequence, over the course of our lives, places become intimately woven into our autobiographical narrative and our sense of self.

The relationship to both time and place has been disrupted. If we want, we can do almost anything at any time of the clock and have access to it wherever we are. The digital world makes it hard to fully inhabit the place we are in: it keeps us semi-distracted and partially elsewhere. Furthermore, the differentiation between work time and rest time, daytime and night-time has been eroded. Sleep is when the microglia cells in the brain carry out their restorative pruning and weeding activities but many people run short on this most basic form of rest and recovery time.