Waning daylight hours are a bane for many of us this time of year. Why does it feel like torture to get up at “oh-dark-thirty” when it didn’t bother us nearly as much to rise at the exact same hour half a year ago?
We know it’s because the Earth on its annual journey around the sun is tilting on its axis away at this time of year, but that doesn’t make the shortening days any easier. We are all too human, after all, and we like our creature comforts, like light and warmth.
Lately I have been discovering and rediscovering the value of getting outside and enjoying the natural world even during the scant hours of daylight in late fall. It’s a little more of an effort. I have to move briskly to stay warm, and there are annoyances like glasses fogging up thanks to my face mask. But the exhilaration and calming effects I feel just walking outside make even the dregs of autumn a special time.
My walks nearby have confirmed my sense of gratitude that I live in such a beautiful part of the country. No matter what the weather this season, there are haunting vistas of ponds, streams, marshes and rivers, and heartening views from hilltops and high places to absorb and gather strength from.
But it’s hard not to notice that weather this fall has been unusually variable, even for a state where folks like to say, “If you don’t like the weather here, wait 10 minutes.” That our weather patterns have become crazily unpredictable underlies an uncomfortable fact we humans acknowledge only in theory: the wolf of climate change is at our door, even in New Hampshire.
Just as the surge in local COVID cases shows that it’s only a matter of time before our state is in the same predicament as others, the unpredictable swings in weather indicate that we’re not far behind states besieged by floods, fires, hurricanes, and other weather catastrophes. Just as we’re learning with COVID that our social habits can literally kill us, we should be learning with the increasingly wild weather that our habits of resource consumption and environmental domination are literally killing our planet.
So far New Hampshire has been spared the very worst of the effects of climate change, but the more I feel the healing effects of being out in the open air, and out in our natural environment, the more I worry about losing it.
Humans evolved along with our natural world. Our daily rhythms, and our need for sunlight, and physical movement, and sleep, are thanks to our planet as it spins on its axis. Our seasonal rhythms are those of the earth, as it orbits the sun. Our desire to make this dark, cold time of year approaching the winter solstice brighter and warmer has evolved because this is the planet we live on.
What hasn’t evolved is our ability to understand and recognize that we need to think more about our big picture and less about our creature comforts if we expect to survive on our planet. We need to understand that we cannot extract resources from the earth unsustainably and poison the environment without irreversibly damaging the only place we have to live.
Do we have it in us to change course and halt the climate crisis we’ve created? I honestly don’t know, and I admit I’m scared.
What I do know is that reconnecting with our natural world is the first step in resolving to change. If more of us went outside and got a daily dose of sunshine, fresh air, and wonder, regardless of the time of year, we might just have the resolve we need to change our course before it’s too late.
(Millie LaFontaine of Concord is a retired neurologist.)