What is really important? What touches us today – and will not go away tomorrow? It’s the things that have moved us since human existence: happiness, love, family, partnership, time, stress, loneliness, farewell, grief.
BILD columnist Louis Hagen*, coming from a German-Jewish family, sought answers to the eternal questions of mankind from poets, thinkers and researchers. And found a few answers that are amazingly simple – and yet can enrich our lives.
★★★
You go out – and you are a different person.
Anyone with high blood pressure calms down. Those who are sad can be happy again. And all of this doesn’t cost a penny. The one who supplies it does it for free: nature.
For the first time, researchers around the world have examined what nature does to us. Test areas in Germany were Upper Lusatia, the Black Forest and the Swabian Jura.
BILD columnist Louis Hagen
Result: Nature makes people friendlier, happier and warmer. It promotes well-being and creativity. Nature is equated with vastness, clarity and freedom. Nature connects generations. Nature is “bigger than oneself”.
I was so obsessed with nature that I lay down in a wet potato field to smell the soil – face down. And I wanted to know: how does the damp forest floor feel after it has rained for days. I rubbed my hands with it. Nature changes you. I was a grown man then, but I felt like a kid again.
“In the smallest things, nature shows her greatest wonders,” wrote the famous Swedish naturalist Carl von Linné (1707-1778). And the French painter Henri Matisse (1869-1954) noted: “There are always flowers for those who want to see them.”
I don’t know if I would stick my nose in a wet potato field again today. But somehow I want to find the flowers Matisse was talking about. And I’m sure they only exist out there, where miracles happen – in nature.
It’s time to go outside.
★★★
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* Louis Hagen (75) was a member of the BILD editor-in-chief for 13 years and is now a consultant at the communications agency WMP. His texts are available as a book at koehler-mittler-shop.de.