Advertise the Doors, Not Just the Destination

We talk a lot about reaching people.

For years, organisations have used expressions such as “hard to reach”, although many of us have become increasingly uncomfortable with that description. Because perhaps people aren’t particularly hard to reach. We know where they are. People go to schools, shops, cafés, libraries, parks, community centres and places of worship. They belong to Facebook groups. They wait at bus stops. They talk to neighbours. They walk the dog. They take their children to school. Perhaps the problem isn’t that people are hard to reach. Perhaps our door isn’t visible from where they are.

And finding the door is only the beginning. Can I tell what this door is for? Am I allowed through it? Will somebody welcome me? Do I need to know something before I enter? Will I be expected to volunteer, join something, commit to something, fill in a form or become something? Can I just have a look? Can I leave again? That last one matters a lot.

We talk a great deal about participation and involvement, particularly when we’re thinking about communities and nature. But participation can very quickly begin to sound like an obligation. Sometimes the first doorway simply needs to say: Come in. Have a look. You don’t have to do anything.

Lots of different doors

Those doorways can be physical. A shed in a park. A library. An environmental centre. A community garden. A café. A Nature Hub. Even a bench where somebody regularly sits and talks to people.

They can be digital. A webpage. A QR code. An email address. A Facebook group. A map showing you somewhere you could visit.

But a digital doorway has to lead somewhere useful. A QR code that takes somebody to an impenetrable webpage isn’t really a doorway. It’s more like finding another locked door.

And then there are the less obvious doorways. A person can be a doorway. So can an invitation, an activity, a question, a conversation or simple curiosity.

“What birds have you seen around here?” might be a much better doorway into caring about nature than: “Would you like to become involved in our environmental programme?”

Advertise the doors

Perhaps this is something we need to think about more. We are quite good at advertising destinations:

Volunteer. Join the Friends Group. Become a Green Champion. Attend our event. Help nature.

But perhaps we also need to advertise the ways in.

Want to ask something? Start here.

Want somewhere to go? Come here.

Want to meet somebody? They’ll be here.

Want to learn something? Try this.

Want to help? Here’s something small.

Just curious? You’re welcome too.

And then let people decide for themselves how far they want to go. Most importantly, let’s advertise those doors to everybody. We don’t necessarily need to decide in advance who is “hard to reach” and then construct a special entrance for them.

We can create lots of ordinary, visible, welcoming doorways and put them in the places people already are. Perhaps, then, we need to change the question.

Instead of asking:

“How do we reach these people?”

we could ask:

“How easy have we made it for people to reach us?”

That feels like a very different place to begin welcoming people in.

Thank you

I feel it is time to talk honestly here about extreme weather and our parks and open spaces.

Sometimes in an attempt to be positive we can be less than open, and sometimes in an attempt to react we can focus on the negatives. I want to try and find a balance.

Yes there have always been extreme events. But we need to understand what is changing and how we can respond to those changes.

There have always been floods, droughts, heatwaves, fallen trees and periods of exceptionally wet or dry weather.

So when somebody says, “We’ve always had weather like this,” they aren’t necessarily wrong.

But they are missing something important.

Frequency and intensity matter. It is worse than before? Is it happening more often?

Something that happens once in fifty years creates a very different risk from something that happens every ten years, every five years, every year or potentially several times in a year. Because there becomes less time for recovery.

And that matters enormously when we look after parks and green spaces.

Risk assessment isn’t simply about asking:

Could this happen?

We also have to ask:

How likely is it to happen?

What would happen if it did?

Has that likelihood changed?

And are the things we put in place previously still enough?

That is where climate change becomes very practical.

The UK’s climate is changing. We are seeing increasing temperatures and changing extremes of heat and rainfall. Climate projections point towards warmer, wetter winters and hotter, drier summers while intense rainfall and flooding can still happen during those drier summers.

That doesn’t mean every storm, flood, fallen tree or dry spell is “caused by climate change”. Weather has always varied.

It means the background conditions and probabilities are changing. And parks experience those changes in complicated ways.

A very wet winter can saturate the ground. A storm arriving afterwards may then affect trees differently.

A prolonged drought can stress a mature tree. Heavy rain a few weeks later doesn’t necessarily undo that stress.

Hot, dry conditions can increase a fire hazard risk by increasing likelihood, impact and harm. What may in other conditions have been a small square of scorched grass, becomes something with devastating consequences.

Intense rainfall can overwhelm paths, drains and watercourses that worked perfectly well for decades. Once can be an inconvenience, multiple times becomes much more damaging.

Newly planted trees may need watering more frequently and for longer than our old maintenance assumptions allowed. If water is in short supply this becomes a series threat to being able to increase the tree canopy.

Grassland, ponds, woodland and wildlife can all respond to combinations of events, not just one dramatic day of weather. Water quality becomes effected and wildlife becomes effected by the stress, showing signs of disease with some diseases being fatal for animals.

And sometimes the consequences aren’t immediate. What happens this year can make something more vulnerable next year.

That creates a difficult reality for Birmingham City Council, Parks staff, contractors, Friends groups, volunteers and communities.

We cannot prevent every problem.

There are thousands of trees, paths, buildings, play areas, watercourses and other assets across our green spaces. Resources are finite. People cannot inspect everything after every weather event, water every tree during every drought or guarantee that nothing will fail.

Nor should every unusual weather event cause panic.

What we can do is get better at noticing when risk has changed.

That might be very simple.

After prolonged rain, perhaps don’t assume the ground or trees are behaving exactly as they normally do.

During extreme heat, reconsider whether that volunteer task, walk or event should happen at the planned time.

After a storm, look before starting work or holding an activity.

During drought, notice struggling young trees and plants and share your concerns early.

If a path repeatedly floods where it didn’t previously, tell someone.

If the same problem keeps happening, don’t keep treating each occurrence as an isolated incident.

And importantly, don’t put yourselves at risk trying to solve something that needs trained staff, specialist equipment or professional assessment.

This isn’t about being frightened of extreme conditions. It is about becoming more observant and adaptable.

And the way we work together is changing too.

Birmingham Parks is increasing the number of people available to gather information, respond to enquiries and work proactively across our parks and green spaces.

For Friends groups, partners and residents, an important part of that will be much clearer communication.

Groups should have good, up-to-date contact information. They should know how and where to report different kinds of problems, what happens to that information once it has been reported, and what to do when something is urgent.

They should also have an understanding of what happens when normal arrangements change including how out-of-hours and on-call arrangements work during an emergency.

Because Friends groups aren’t simply another name on a contact list and residents are just people who live close by.

You are people who know these places.

So you notice the tree that suddenly looks different. The place that floods when it didn’t before. The damaged gate. The blocked drain. The path people have stopped using. The young trees beginning to struggle.

That local knowledge is incredibly valuable.

So we need to think about the two connected ways of working.

There is the normal operating procedure — how we look after parks, report problems, organise activities, share information and work together every day.

And there is the emergency operating procedure — what happens when something exceptional occurs and the usual arrangements are no longer enough. This includes extreme weather.

Friends groups and community partners need to be aware of and have an understanding of both of these.

That doesn’t mean asking volunteers to become emergency responders. Quite the opposite.

It means people knowing what to do, what not to do, who to contact and what happens next.

And it means Parks getting better at receiving information from the people on the ground, bringing it together, understanding what it is telling us and responding appropriately.

Risk assessments shouldn’t be documents that are written once and put in a folder. They should change when the world around them changes.

Procedures shouldn’t remain unchanged either.

And our communication can’t simply be something we think about after an emergency has happened.

We need to practise how we work together before we need it.

And there is hope in that.

Parks themselves are part of the solution. Trees provide shade and cooling. Healthy soils absorb water. Wetlands can hold it. Vegetation can slow runoff. Connected habitats can give wildlife somewhere to move. Well-designed green spaces can make neighbourhoods more resilient to heat and flooding.

Nature is resilient if we care for it and realise that in an urban area like a town of city we are very much part of that living system.

So adaptation isn’t simply about defending our parks from climate change. It is also about helping our parks protect us.

We don’t need everyone to become a climate scientist or emergency responder.

We need people to feel they are part of a much bigger system.

And we need people who know their local green spaces to keep doing something they are extraordinarily good at:

Noticing.

Notice what is changing.

Tell someone.

Know who to tell.

Learn from what happens.

Change what we do when the evidence tells us we need to.

And know that somebody is listening at the other end and will know how to respond.

Thank you for everything everyone who cares is already doing.

You are making a vital difference and the actions you take are massively appreciated! That’s every day not just in extreme conditions.

Together we can all act to manage the effects of our changing environment now and support the long term changes needed for a better future.

Look at Your Shoes

What are sustainability’s three simple words?

Do you remember – Clunk, click, every trip.

Stop. Look. Listen.

Stay home. Protect the NHS. Save lives.

Three short instructions can sometimes carry an extraordinary amount of complexity.

They don’t explain everything. They aren’t supposed to.

“Stop. Look. Listen.” doesn’t explain traffic engineering, stopping distances, human reaction times or the physics of a collision. It gives us a simple behaviour that helps us navigate all that complexity.

And I’ve been wondering: what is the sustainability equivalent? Because sustainability is complicated. Really complicated. Years ago, I attended a sustainability workshop that began with one of the simplest exercises I have ever encountered.

Look – at – your shoes.

That was it. Look at the shoes you are wearing and imagine their entire life.

Where did the materials come from? Perhaps there is rubber, leather, cotton, polyester, foam, metal, glue and dye. Each has its own story.

Something was grown, extracted or manufactured somewhere. Water was used. Energy was used. Land was used.

Those materials were processed. Transported. Processed again.

Eventually they arrived at a factory where somebody made them into shoes.

Then the finished shoes travelled too. Perhaps by road, rail and ship. They were packaged, stored in a warehouse, transported again, displayed in a shop or delivered to your door. All before you took your first step in them.

And the story doesn’t end there. How often will you wear them? How long will they last? Can they be repaired? What happens when you no longer want them? Can they be reused, recycled or repurposed? Or will all those materials, all that energy, all that water, all that work and all those miles eventually become waste?

All of that is sitting quietly on your feet. And that’s just your shoes. Now look around the room.

The chair. The table. The phone. The cup. The carpet. The window.

Then think about breakfast. Or the journey to work. Or the building you’re sitting in.

Pull one thread and suddenly you discover that almost everything connects to everything else.

That is both the wonder and the problem of sustainability.

We have spent years trying to explain the complexity. Carbon footprints. Biodiversity. Circular economies. Net zero. Supply chains. Water use. Fair trade. Climate adaptation. Nature recovery. Food miles. Embodied carbon.

All important. But perhaps there’s another question we need to ask.

How much of that complexity does someone need to understand in order to make a better choice? We don’t teach children the physics of moving vehicles before telling them how to cross a road.

We say: Stop. Look. Listen.

The complexity hasn’t disappeared. We’ve simply created a small human behaviour that helps us navigate it. Perhaps sustainability needs something similar. I’ve been playing with possibilities.

Look. Think. Choose.

Look at the thing in front of you. Think about where it came from, what it took to make it and where it will go next. Then choose. Or perhaps:

Need it. Use it. Keep it.

Do I need it? If I have it, can I make proper use of it? Can I keep it going for longer — maintain it, repair it, share it, reuse it or pass it on?

Neither feels quite right yet. And perhaps that’s the interesting bit. Because I’m beginning to wonder whether we’ve been trying to make sustainability simple when what we actually need to make simple is the way we respond to its complexity.

Three words aren’t going to explain sustainability. Bu they don’t need to – to start with. They just need to create that tiny moment between acting automatically and making a conscious choice.

A pause. A question. A different possibility.

So perhaps, for now, we start where that workshop started.

Look at your shoes.

Really look at them.

There is a whole world beneath your feet.

And then ask yourself:

What three simple words might help us take better care of it?

Oh and for those that don’t remember it:

Clunk: Close your car door.

Click: Fasten your seat belt.

Every Trip: Wear it even on short local journeys.

I know I’m showing my age but I have never forgotten it!

Look for the rivers

I’ve been thinking about why people don’t use parks.

It’s one of those questions we ask quite often. We know that spending time in nature can be good for our health and wellbeing. We know parks provide places to walk, play, meet, exercise, notice wildlife or simply sit for a while.

So why doesn’t everyone use them?

Strangely, one of my favourite films – When Harry Met Sally, gave me somewhere to start. At one point Harry leaves Sally a message after she hasn’t returned his calls. He offers two possible explanations: either A. she doesn’t want to speak to him, or B. she desperately wants to speak to him but is trapped under something heavy.

Perhaps we need to ask something similar about parks. Is it:

A. I don’t want to use the park.

Or:

B. I would like to use the park, but something is stopping me.

Those are two very different things.

For B, the “something heavy” might be poor health, disability, fear, lack of time, caring responsibilities, nowhere to sit, no toilet, an inaccessible entrance, previous bad experiences, not having anyone to go with, or simply a feeling that this place isn’t really for people like me.

Those are barriers. And if we can understand them, perhaps some of them can be removed. But A matters too. What if somebody simply doesn’t want to go to the park Do we need to change their mind? Perhaps not.

And, as it happens, Sally turns out to offer another possibility: C. I don’t really know what I want yet.

Perhaps someone has never had the experience that might help them discover what a park or nature more widely could mean to them. Nobody has shown them the blackberries, invited them on the walk, helped them notice the kingfisher or made that first encounter feel as though it belonged to them.

And then there is another possibility:

D. I already have a relationship with nature. You’re just not looking in the right place.

Because accessing nature and visiting a park are not the same thing. People experience nature in gardens, streets, canals, allotments, cemeteries, school grounds, food, weather, memories, stories and through their windows. Someone can care passionately about elephants in Africa without ever having seen one in the wild or travelled to Africa. Distance doesn’t make that care imaginary.

Equally, someone can walk through a park every day and feel very little connection with the nature around them. Perhaps we have been looking for a straight line:

Access → Visit → Participate → Connect → Value → Care

It’s wonderfully neat.

It’s also not particularly human.

People arrive at care, connection and action from all sorts of directions. One person begins with football. Another with gardening. Someone else with birds, childhood memories, climate change, photography, food, their dog, a television programme or the tree outside their bedroom window. There is no single path. And that brings me to that phrase people use “…… like a fish needs a bicycle.”

The humour comes from offering something as a necessity to a creature for whom it makes absolutely no sense. Sometimes I wonder whether, with the very best of intentions, we do something similar.

There’s a park ten minutes away.

We’ve organised an activity.

It’s free.

Nature is good for you.

Why aren’t you coming?

Perhaps sometimes we are trying to give a fish a bicycle. That doesn’t mean the fish needs nothing. It means we haven’t understood what the fish needs. And that takes us back to the heart of Birmingham’s City of Nature ambition: Fair.

Fair isn’t equality. It is equity. Equality might say, Everyone gets the same park, the same activity, the same opportunity. Equity asks, What does each person need?

And the word everyone matters here – everyone doesn’t mean an imaginary average population. It means each and every person. Each with different experiences, abilities, cultures, interests, fears, responsibilities, memories and desires.

Of course, no city can create a completely bespoke system for every individual. Schools need timetables. Health services need pathways. Councils need processes. Parks need management plans. Systems need some standardisation simply to function.

The danger comes when we forget that the system is a tool for managing complexity and start expecting people to become less complex so that they fit it. Perhaps that is also why consultation can sometimes be so frustrating. We ask people what they want. They tell us. And then, without necessarily meaning to, we translate what they have told us into something our existing system already understands how to provide.

Someone says, I’d like somewhere comfortable to sit outside with my neighbours.

We hear: park facilities.

Someone says, I want my children to be able to play outside.

We hear: playground provision.

Someone says, I’m lonely.

We hear: organised social activity.

None of those responses is necessarily wrong.

But somewhere in the translation we can lose the person. And perhaps there is an even bigger problem. Maybe there are already far more pathways than we realise.

We simply don’t recognise them as paths.

Imagine we are assessing access. We look for the path. We find the tarmac path. We can measure it. Its width. Its condition. Its gradient. Where it starts and finishes. How many people use it. Excellent. Except – what if there’s a fish beside us. And the fish isn’t using our path. We could improve the signage. Run an engagement campaign. Organise a fish only group and invest in a beautifully resurfaced accessible route.

Eventually we will write:

“Despite significant investment, uptake remains disappointingly low.”

Because we never noticed the obvious. The river is the fish’s path to the park but we weren’t looking at the river.

What if we’re doing versions of that with people? If we define engagement as attending an organised activity, we will find attendees. If we define connection with nature as visiting a park, we will find park visitors.

If we define volunteering as signing up for a volunteer session, we will find registered volunteers.

And everyone else risks becoming “hard to reach”, “inactive”, “disengaged” or “non-users”.

But perhaps some of them aren’t disengaged at all. Perhaps we’re counting feet on tarmac but not seeing:

The woman watching blackbirds from her kitchen window.

The teenager who takes the canal route home.

The child fascinated by dinosaurs.

The gardener saving seeds their grandparents grew.

The person donating money to protect animals thousands of miles away.

The commuter who loves watching the seasons change through the bus window.

Those might all be different paths or perhaps they are rivers or streams – different environments

And that changes the question. Instead of asking:

How do we get more people onto the path we have created?

Perhaps we should ask:

What relationship with nature does each person want or need and is our city enabling it?

And before we build another high quality tarmac path, perhaps we should spend a little more time looking for the rivers.

Everyone Has an Earth Story.

In 1990, as the Voyager 1 spacecraft left our solar system, it turned its camera back towards home for one last photograph.

In that image, the Earth is almost invisible – a tiny pale blue dot suspended in a vast darkness. It inspired one of Carl Sagan’s most memorable reflections:

“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us.”

Everything we have ever known has happened there.

Every mountain and meadow. Every city and village. Every river and ocean. Every language, every culture, every child, every act of kindness and every disagreement. Every park, every tree and every bird.

Everything.

That image has stayed with me since then, and perhaps it explains why, when we began collecting people’s memories of parks and green spaces, I wanted to call them Earth Stories rather than Nature Stories.

At first glance, the two phrases seem almost interchangeable. But over time I have come to realise they are not.

When we hear the word nature, many of us picture wildlife, forests, flowers or birdsong. We rarely think of the sky above us, the rain that falls, the rivers that shape our landscapes or the ground beneath our feet. We almost never include ourselves.

Yet we are all part of the same Earth. Perhaps that small shift in language matters.

Over many years, I have had some wonderfully honest conversations with people from all over the world about their relationship with the natural world in Britain. Those conversations have taught me something I hadn’t expected.

People didn’t tell me they disliked nature.

They told me they didn’t always recognise it.

The trees were unfamiliar. The birds sounded different. The seasons felt strange. The landscape held none of the memories they had grown up with.

One conversation, in particular, changed how I thought about Earth Stories.

A woman shared a story about a bedspread she had brought with her from the village where she had grown up. It was embroidered with flowers from her home. Whenever she missed her village, she would look at those flowers.

When I first heard her story, I remember thinking, “Is a bedspread an Earth Story.” Then, almost instantly, I realised I was completely wrong. The story wasn’t about the bedspread. It was about recognition and connection.

Those embroidered flowers were more than decoration. They carried memories of a place, a landscape, a childhood and a sense of belonging. Looking at them allowed her, just for a moment, to return home.

That conversation made me realise something else. It isn’t only people who have moved across continents who experience this. I do too.

I was born in Birmingham and spent much of my working life in Birmingham. I know its parks, canals, woodlands and communities well. I care deeply about it and feel connected to it and I do feel I belong.

Yet if I’m completely honest, it isn’t city skylines that stirs something deepest within me. It is where the mountains touch the sea – Hvor fjell møter hav or Môr a Mynydd or even Rubha (pronounced “roo-ah”).

When I stand among them, something feels instantly familiar in a way that is difficult to explain. It feels older than memory. Perhaps it is shaped by family stories, by heritage, by generations before me. My own roots reach into Wales, Scotland and Scandinavia. Like many people, my story is woven from more than one place.

The more I have reflected on this, the more I have realised that belonging is rarely simple. We often ask how we can help people connect with nature. Perhaps that isn’t quite the right question. Perhaps we should ask how people come to recognise the place they now call home.

Recognition may be the first step. We recognise. We become familiar. From familiarity grows affection. From affection comes belonging.

And when we feel we belong somewhere, we are much more likely to care for it.

Around the world, many cultures have words that describe this relationship more completely than modern English does. The Māori speak of belonging to place, of guardianship that grows from kinship with the land. In Welsh there is the beautiful word cynefin – the place where you naturally belong, where the landscape has shaped you as much as you have shaped it.

Perhaps English has never lost the feeling. Perhaps it has simply lost some of the words. In a city like Birmingham, where people have arrived from every corner of the world, this feels especially important.

We don’t all begin our Earth Stories in the same place. Some begin beside mountains or rivers. Some among forests, deserts, islands or great cities. Some begin thousands of miles away some just hundreds. None of those stories is more authentic than another. What matters is that we continue to write them.

Perhaps our role is not simply to encourage people to visit parks or learn the names of trees. Perhaps it is to help one another recognise this place while honouring the places that shaped us.

To notice the changing seasons.
To find a favourite path.
To hear birds that gradually become familiar.
To discover views that, over time, become part of our own story.

Because belonging cannot be instructed. It grows through experience.

Through memory.
Through recognition.
Through time.

When Carl Sagan looked back at our tiny pale blue dot, he wasn’t looking at separate countries, cultures or landscapes. He was looking at home.

Every one of us has an Earth Story. Some began where you are now, Some began elsewhere. But together they remind us that we all share the same remarkable world, and every new place we come to know has the potential to become part of who we are.

Perhaps that is what belonging really is.

Not forgetting where our story began, but allowing it to keep growing wherever life leads us.

The Crack in the Patio

There is a tomato plant growing in a crack in my patio.

It wasn’t planted there.

I didn’t water it every day or carefully prepare the soil. In fact, I almost missed it. Yet today it is four times the size of the tomato plant I lovingly nurtured in a pot.

It made me wonder how often we misunderstand what it means to help something grow.

For much of my life I have sown seeds. Sometimes literally. More often through conversations, projects, partnerships and ideas.

Like many people, I wanted to see those seeds flourish. I thought that meant finding the right place, the right conditions and the right plan. Experience has taught me something gentler. Our role is not always to decide where something should grow. Sometimes it is simply to notice where it already is.

Nature rarely asks permission. Seeds travel on the wind, in the feathers of birds, on muddy boots and in forgotten corners. Most never germinate. A few find exactly the right combination of light, moisture and opportunity. Those are often the ones that surprise us. People can be like that too.

We spend a great deal of time trying to cultivate perfect pathways through education, careers, organisations and carefully designed programmes. Those things matter. They create opportunities.

But occasionally someone flourishes because they found their own small crack in the patio.

A place that no one planned.

A chance conversation.

A volunteer session.

A walk in the woods.

A community garden.

A park bench.

An unexpected invitation.

A moment when someone simply noticed them.

Looking back over the years, I realise I have been less of a gardener than I imagined. Perhaps I have simply been a seed sower.

Or maybe just someone who clears away enough of the moss and fallen leaves for others to notice the tiny green shoot already pushing through. That thought brings me comfort. It means I don’t have to make everything happen. I don’t have to convince everyone. I don’t have to hold every project together forever. I simply have to keep creating places where life has a chance to emerge.

The remarkable thing is that the strongest seeds often find their own way. They develop deep roots because they have to. They learn to bend with the wind because no one shelters them forever. They become part of the landscape rather than an exhibit within it.

Perhaps that is true of ideas as well. We can nurture them for a while. Then we have to let them travel.

Some will disappear. Some will lie dormant for years. And some will quietly find the one small crack where they can grow into something far bigger than we ever imagined.

Maybe that is enough.

Perhaps the most generous thing we can do is not to grow people into the shape we think they should become.

Perhaps it is simply to help them find the crack in the patio where they can grow into themselves.

Looking Outward

Sometimes, to understand ourselves more clearly, we have to look further away.

When the Voyager 1 spacecraft turned its camera back towards Earth in 1990, it captured one of the most famous images ever taken. Our entire world appeared as a tiny, almost invisible speck of light suspended in a sunbeam. Carl Sagan called it the Pale Blue Dot.

Looking at that image, it’s almost impossible not to feel your perspective change. Our arguments seem a little smaller. Our borders become invisible. Our differences begin to look less like divisions and more like variations within one remarkable story.

Perspective changes everything. Perhaps that is why we climb hills. Why we build observatories. Why astronauts describe seeing Earth from space as a life-changing experience. Sometimes we need to step back in order to see more clearly.

I wonder if we sometimes forget to do that in everyday life. We become so busy managing our lives that we lose sight of life itself. We become experts in systems but forget what those systems were created to achieve.

We pursue efficiency and then search for wellbeing. We build complexity and then long for simplicity. Perhaps we haven’t lost these things at all. Perhaps we’ve simply laid them down along the path without noticing.

Like a favourite walking stick forgotten against a gate.

Or a pair of glasses resting on top of our heads while we search the house. They are not gone. They are waiting to be rediscovered.

I often hear people speak about “getting back to nature,” as though nature were somewhere else. Yet perhaps the real journey isn’t back. Perhaps it is inward. A rediscovery that nature has always included us.

We are not visitors to this pale blue dot. We are expressions of it.

That doesn’t make us less remarkable. It makes our responsibility even greater. Looking back from space doesn’t diminish humanity. It reminds us how extraordinary it is that one small world can hold forests and cities, butterflies and telescopes, poetry and physics, Star Trek and Shakespeare, strangers and friends.

Every act of kindness. Every volunteer. Every child planting their first tree. Every conversation on a park bench.

All happening on this tiny blue world.

Perhaps sometimes we need to look outward…

…simply to remember who we are.

With time – You Become the Journey

There comes a point in many walks when you stop looking at the map. Not because you’re lost. Nor because you’ve reached your destination. But because something else has begun to guide you.

When we’re young, life often feels like a series of destinations. This is where I went to school, this is where I had my first job, this is where we got married. Almost as though life were a checklist of places to arrive.

We spend years asking ourselves: “What path should I take?” It’s a sensible question.

Maps matter.
Planning matters.

Knowing where we’re heading can help us take the first step. But after enough years, enough wrong turns, enough unexpected encounters and enough beautiful detours, another question begins to emerge.

Perhaps the better question is:

“What sort of traveller am I becoming?”

Because life has a curious habit of changing us while we’re busy trying to change our circumstances. The places we visit leave traces behind. So do the people we meet.

The conversations we have on park benches.
The rivers we stop beside.
The trees we lean against.
The storms we shelter from.
The paths we never intended to take.

Every journey leaves something with us and over time, we realise that we are not simply moving through landscapes. The landscapes are moving through us.

Perhaps that is why some people become gentler with age. Not because life has become easier. But because they have travelled far enough to know that certainty is rarely as valuable as curiosity.

That every horizon reveals another and that every answer creates a better question.

Nature seems to understand this instinctively that a river never arrives. It is always becoming. A tree is never finished. It is always growing. Eventually breaking down to help sustain it’s regenerative parts.

Even a woodland is less a place than an ongoing conversation between countless lives unfolding across time. So perhaps we are no different. We often imagine that wisdom is about finding the right destination. Maybe wisdom is really about learning how to travel well.

To notice. To wonder. To leave places a little better than we found them. To walk gently enough that others are encouraged to join us. To know when to lead and when simply to walk alongside.

Looking back, I can see that many of the paths I thought were taking me somewhere were actually shaping who I was becoming. The destination was never the whole story. The journey was quietly doing its own work.

And somewhere along the road, almost without noticing…

…you become the journey.

How do we make working life feel more like life?

Today is #OutdoorOfficeDay – 11th June 2026

The obvious interpretation is simple.

Take your work outside. And yes, that’s a great place to start.

Take a call while walking.
Have a meeting on a park bench.
Drink your tea outside.
Look up from your screen for a few minutes.

But perhaps Outdoor Office Day is asking a bigger question. We often talk about work-life balance. Yet work happens during our lives.

We spend a huge proportion of our waking hours working.

We learn at work.
We build relationships at work.
We solve problems at work.
We contribute to society through work.

So if work isn’t life, what is it? Perhaps we’ve accidentally separated something that was never really separate. For most of human history there wasn’t a distinction between “work” and “life”.

There was simply life.

Finding food.
Building shelter.
Making things.
Learning.
Caring.
Resting.
Playing.
Being part of a community.

Somewhere along the way we became very good at putting activities into boxes.

Work.
Home.
Leisure.
Nature.

Useful categories perhaps. But they can sometimes make us forget that we’re still people first. Maybe that’s why a short walk can change the feel of a meeting.

Why a conversation can sometimes achieve more than a dozen emails.

Why changing the view can change the thinking.

Why drinking tea beneath a tree can feel strangely important.

Not because productivity has stopped. But because life hasn’t.

So perhaps Outdoor Office Day isn’t really about taking work outside. Perhaps it’s about remembering that work happens inside life, not the other way around.

And if we’re serious about wellbeing, maybe the question isn’t:

“How do we balance work and life?”

Maybe it’s:

“How do we make working life feel more like life?”

Walkshops instead of workshops.

Walking conversations instead of meetings.

Tea outside.

Greetings instead of emails.

Looking up.

Listening.

Taking a moment to notice the world around us.

Not because work matters less. But because people matter more.

The Green Thread: The Hopscotch Test

I recently saw a short video that has stayed with me.

Someone had drawn a simple hopscotch grid in chalk on a pavement. Nothing complicated. Just a few numbered squares. The camera then recorded the reactions of adults walking past. Many people didn’t notice it at all. Some were looking at their phones. Some stepped around it unsure what it was, others passed without a glance and some saw it and smiled before continuing on their way.

But then something interesting happened. Every so often, somebody hopped. Perhaps only for a second sometimes only a couple of squares. Sometimes alone but often with a friend. Almost always laughing.

And it made me wonder: What exactly were they responding to?

The chalk?
The game?
A memory?
Or an invitation?

As adults, we spend much of our lives moving with purpose. From meeting to meeting.
Task to task. Notification to notification. We become very good at getting to the next place often without hestiation.

Less often do we allow ourselves to simply experience where we already are. Yet many of the things we value about nature work in a remarkably similar way to that hopscotch grid.

A winding path invites exploration.
A fallen tree invites balancing.
A stream invites curiosity.
A meadow invites wandering.
A bench invites pause.

None of these things demand our attention. They simply offer it. Whether we accept the invitation is up to us.

Perhaps that is one reason why parks and green spaces matter. Not only because they support biodiversity, improve air quality, reduce flooding, store carbon, or contribute to physical and mental health. They do all of those things. But they also provide something harder to measure.

Permission – Permission to slow down, to notice, to wonder and to play.

Children rarely need encouragement to do this. They instinctively turn spaces into adventures. A patch of grass becomes a kingdom, a stick becomes a sword, wand or fishing rod and a puddle becomes an irresistible challenge.

Adults often need reminding. Not because we have lost the ability. Because we have become distracted from it. Perhaps that is why the adults who hopped along the chalk squares were smiling. For a moment they stepped outside the script and were not simply passing through a space they were participating in it.

The hopscotch grid disappeared eventually. Rain would have washed it away. But for a few hours it changed how people moved through that place. It nudged them from observer to participant. And perhaps that is one of the quiet lessons hidden within a City of Nature. The goal is not simply to create greener spaces. It is to create places that invite people back into relationship with the world around them.

Places that encourage us to notice, to connect, to explore and every now and then -to hop.