Now More Than Ever..

I keep thinking about how strange this year has felt. Something like a strange disconnect the world over but not so black and white.

Not dramatic strange either, nothing you could point to on a single day and say that’s when it changed, but a kind of low hum underneath everything, the sense that the world is moving faster than any of us actually asked it to. Every few months there’s a new thing we’re all supposed to have opinions about, a new tool that’s meant to save us time, that’s meant to make our lives better but somehow just adds another tab, another notification, another small tug on our attention, done so innocuously that we’ve stopped noticing because there are so many of them now. I don’t think I’m alone in feeling like 2026 is the year everything got very clever and, at the same time, quietly harder to actually feel anything real. That’s the bit that worries me. Not the pace of it. The numbness that comes with the pace.

Which is probably why, without planning to, I’ve spent more time than usual so far this year standing in places that don’t care in the slightest what year it is. A few weeks back I was on the machair above Luskentyre beach on Harris with the wind stretching out shapes with my jacket and the sea a grey/turquoise mix that looks fake in photographs even though it isn’t, and I remember thinking, quite simply, this is the only feed I want to be scrolling.

I’m lucky it happens to be my job to be out there, but I don’t think you need to make a living from it to feel what this feels like.

There’s a particular kind of quiet you get in places like Skye, Mull and Harris, that I’ve genuinely never found anywhere else, not in an empty house, not in a meditation app, not in any of the things we’re sold as shortcuts to calm. It’s not a shortcut. It’s just the actual thing, unfiltered and raw, and I think we need it now more than we’ve needed it in years, because whatever’s pulling us away from ourselves has never been this good at its job.

Part of what does it, I think, is being made to wait.

There’s a spot on the ferry crossing to the Isle of Mull where the coffee always goes lukewarm before you’ve finished it, and you stand on deck with nowhere to be and nothing worth checking, and about twenty minutes in, that hidden tension in your shoulders drops away and you just kind fall into the rhythm of the boat, of the waves. I’ve had some of my best conversations with myself in moments like that, the kind you can only have when nobody, including you, is trying to fill the silence.

Visiting Skye does the same thing from the other direction, not through waiting so much but through scale. There’s a spot looking down on Neist Point where I can sit for an hour with nothing but the lighthouse, the distant swell hitting the rocks below, and seabirds above, folding themselves out of the sky into the water. My hands go numb from the cold but I barely even notice, because I’m just there.

Just listening. Memorising the views.

The wind out there in such places blows slower when you are immersed in it, like it enveloped you in its own rhythm and accepted you and once you’ve sat in it long enough you understand why folk out here talk about weather the way city people talk about traffic.

It’s a presence. It has moods.

Learning to read it instead of ignoring it is its own small act of attention, and it’s one most of us let go of a long time ago.

There’s being in nature and there’s being in nature.

None of this needs to be dramatic to work. One of my favourite places - The Isle of Mull will remind you of that within the hour, because single track roads mean stopping constantly, for sheep, for another car easing past, for the enormous unbothered luck of a white tailed eagle drifting over Loch Na Keal like it owns the place, which it probably does more than any of us ever will.

You cannot rush a place like that, even if you want to, and it doesn’t try to be gentle about teaching you that. Many of the islands and coastal stretches of Scotland are this way. I stopped at a croft shop on the Isle of Harris in the spring, more shed than shop in all fairness and transparency, run by a woman who’d clearly not rushed a decision in her life, who would strike up a conversation with you for ten minutes before even acknowledging what you were trying to purchase.

On this occasion I bought vegetables that taste like they are supposed to, literal fresh bread still warm, eggs from the farm down the road. It was, without exaggeration, one of the best meals I’ve had all year, just because it smelt, looked and tasted like it had come from the earth, not from a factory. You really can taste that.

There’s a satisfaction in eating something that travelled a few hundred yards instead of a few thousand miles, that someone grew with their own hands within sight of where you’re eating it, that I don’t think I’d ever properly noticed until I started spending real time in such places.

It slows you down just to eat it right.

You can’t wolf down something that tastes like nature. Same goes to exploring the many seafood stops along the scottish coast. A plate of langoustines on a quay somewhere, still faintly of the sea they came out of an hour earlier, eaten standing up because there wasn’t a table free, and somehow one of the finest meals of my year regardless.

It’s the small sensory things, more than the big dramatic views, that I think get completely drowned out in ordinary life, and the Highlands doesn’t ration them the way everywhere else seems to. The hush right after a wave pulls back over shingle before the next one arrives. Peat smoke drifting from a cottage chimney on a still evening, that smell that somehow seems familiar even if you’ve never lived anywhere near a peat fire. The cold shock of Atlantic water round your ankles that makes you gasp every time no matter how many times you’ve done it. We live vicariously through our instagram feeds, this looks amazing, that looks incredible, but how many of us actually go experience it for ourselves? None of the truth of a place registers on a screen. None of it fits in a notification. Yet somehow we are becoming more and more content to scroll, view, imagine and the forget.

We are not built to passively experience anything.

Some of you understand.

Some of you will do your own version of connecting with nature.

But do you come away from it revitalised or is it just a brief distraction from your life?

If it doesn’t linger in your senses after and leave you wanting more then maybe you are just giving it token attention.

You have to actually be there, in your body, present and engaged for any of it to really land, which is exactly why it does the thing scrolling never can.

We all desperately need a greater and prolonged reconnection with nature before technology swallows up out human-ness altogether

If you’re wanting to try some of this yourself, and I’d genuinely encourage it, I don’t think you need three weeks and a campervan, though I’d never talk you out of that either. Go somewhere with a horizon in it and weather you can feel on your face. Eat something local if the chance comes up, ask where it grew, let the answer be somewhere you could walk to. Take the ferry if there’s one going and leave your phone in your pocket for the crossing, just watch the water and let yourself be properly bored for a while, because that’s usually where the good thoughts have been hiding. Sit somewhere longer than feels comfortable and let the discomfort pass, because it always does, and what’s normally waiting on the other side of it is the first quiet thought you’ve had in weeks.

I don’t think nature fixes everything, and I’d be lying if I said every trip out into the wilds has been some transcendent reset, some days it’s cold and wet and you eat a soggy sandwich in the car questioning your life choices but even those days leave something behind that scrolling never does, a kind of proof that you were somewhere real, doing something real, feeling something real, instead of just consuming your way through another day.

In a year that keeps asking more of our attention than it has any right to, I think that proof matters more than it used to. So I will keep going back to places like Skye and Harris for as long as they’ll have me, not because the light’s good for photographs, though it is, but because out there I remember what it feels like to be a person rather than an inbox.

That’s been worth every soaked boot and delayed ferry it’s cost me so far, and I can’t see that changing any time soon. Now, more than ever, we all need to get back to nature. What are you going to do about that?

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