Tired of seeking novelty? Embrace the familiar.
And: you can call me Ove.
“I used to think you should keep experimenting and seeing new things. But after seeing a lot of the world, I now tend to return to the same spots. I enjoy the familiarity.” Louise Nursing, musician.
Dammed up water, a concrete retaining wall and a broken sidewalk are positioned just right at my favorite green space; an arrangement that makes it comfortable for me to get eye-level with Nancy Creek.
I do this regularly. Once last summer, I looked into the water and spotted a big turtle, steadily web-footing it away from me
“Hey, look, a turtle. Swimming,” I yelled over to my friends. “He’s right here. Not even that afraid of me.”
They hurried over, and we watched. The size of a kindergartener’s backpack he was, but dull, a gray-to-mud shade a five-year-old would shun. As a community scientist, I immediately started taking pictures of him since I wanted some photos for iNaturalist. As I snapped, I noticed a V-shaped scar on his shell.
Wonder what he did to get that crusty old V?
Later, with the help of iNaturalist, I learned he was a common snapping turtle, belonging to a species of fighters who are capable of hour-long battles rife with hard biting, a lot of hissing, and plenty of claw-forward scratching.
So. Scar explained.
The cool thing was, the next day when I went back to the preserve, stopped to look in the water at the exact same place, there Mr. V Tough Guy was again. That made my day, just to see him chilling there seemingly without a care in the world.
Such are the pleasures in returning to the same places. Of familiarity.
“Familiarity doesn’t always breed contempt. Sometimes familiarity is just cool.” Arn Anderson, professional wrestler.
Conventional wisdom has it that we should embrace new experiences, always trying to rest our eyes on something fresh all the time. Often the message is that the latest thing or brand new place is probably better. From an evolutionary perspective, however, it’s proven that we humans feel safer in familiar places. In fact, the near-and-dear is the perfect antidote to anxiety because we thrive in environments where there is consistency.
I’m consistent in my devotion to a nearby natural space, the 30-acre Blue Heron Nature Preserve. The preserve is a linear city park set along a portion of Atlanta’s Nancy Creek. I started going there during the pandemic for long, almost daily, walks to smell the open air out among the trees. The trail names are promising, and invite you in to visit. There’s the Painted Turtle, the Blueway, and the Beaver, which is my favorite path because I saw the tail end, just a sliver of a beaver’s tail disappearing into the bushes there one time. Ever since, I look for a beaver every time I go by. I always look for the turtle too, but haven’t seen him again.
The whole area of the Blue Heron is a floodplain, which is probably why it never got developed with concrete driveways leading to mini-mansions. Sometimes Nancy Creek swells out of its creekbed to make the wetlands wetter, but the winding boardwalks keep things tidy for us humans. In fact, the smooth boardwalks are also one of my favorite things over at Blue Heron, because I know I can trust them. I can look up and keep walking, probably not tripping while at the same time searching skywards for whatever—a hawk, a nest, or maybe a sliver of the daytime moon.
Do you know about iNaturalist project pages?
The iNaturalist Project Page for the Blue Heron Nature Preserve has been a big attraction for me. iNat project pages are separate areas of the app where someone has set up a special space for observations from a certain area (or about a certain thing) to be pooled into one digital place. The idea is a cool one, because I can visit a project page before I go to a new place to get an idea of what I may encounter there.
A few more thoughts about why familiarity is so fun and good for us.
If walks in nature are about discovery, repeat visits are about going more than skin deep.
Going back to the same place provides an emotional attachment.
If we had a good time in a place on the last visit, we have the sense that it will also be good on the next visit. It goes like this: visit. have fun. repeat.
“When we visit a familiar place, we know what to expect. We feel safe and we can let our guard down. This means we can offer our minds and bodies the opportunity to relax and recharge.” - Georgina Sturmer, counselor quoted in Happiful Magazine.
Just call me Ove.
Sometimes, down at Blue Heron, I feel like that guy Ove. Did you see the movie? This old guy is a busybody always checking the outsides of his shared housing, looking to see if the garage doors are closed properly, the trash is picked up on time, and the bikes are locked securely.
That’s me down at the Blue Heron. You can tell that I’m down there a lot based on my stories from last year, including “Globe at Night” and “The Southeast Bumble Bee Atlas.”
Some popular iNaturalist project pages:
Invasive Species in the Lower Hudson
Love this, Pam! Returning to nature spots really does create a sense of comfort and takes us out of the frenetic world during a chaotic time.
I love reading your posts and look forward to them.