What's the good in a view? - #107

The advantage to vantage points.

Before we get started, there won’t be a newsletter on Sunday October 22nd. Taking the week off to spend some quality time with my parents. See you on October 29! Wednesday newsletters for paid subscribers will still go out. 

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Between 1972 and 1981, 46 patients recovered from the removal of their gallbladders in a suburban Pennsylvania hospital. They received the standardized care for the time with only one major difference: 23 of them had a window that faced another building while the other 23 had a window that looked out on nature. Researchers wanted to understand what effect the view of a natural setting might have on recovery. Did it matter what you saw out the window? Wasn’t having a window good enough? But no, it wasn’t. The 23 patients with the greener view had “shorter postoperative stays, received fewer negative evaluative comments in nurses' notes, and took fewer potent analgesics.” They left sooner with fewer meds and a better attitude.

Another 46 people, decades later and across the Atlantic would find similar results. Students were recruited at the Vrije University Medical Centre in the Netherlands to see how viewing images with greenery versus images of just buildings affected their nervous systems. Participants were hooked up with sensors to monitor their heart rates and stress levels while completing math problems of varying difficulty. After completing the problems, they looked at the pictures. And no surprise, the “findings provide support for greater recovery after viewing green scenes, as marked by a stronger increase in RSA as a marker of parasympathetic activity.” Even images with nature in them helped lower stress levels. 

We love to look at nature. We love to summit peaks and forest bathe and we love, love, love a view. The first time I had a view was when I moved to the British Virgin Islands. I looked out over the Caribbean Sea onto the Dog Islands, Scrub Island, and then Tortola looming over them in the distance. Every night I would watch the sun set over the rounded tops of those little paradises, letting the oranges pinks and purples paint over the melancholy of the day like a glass of good wine I could not afford. The expanse was a salve, however short-lived. 

It wouldn’t be until seven years later when I’d find another view to match it. The Tree House, we called it. A worse-for-wear hunting cabin in Topanga Canyon, California, with a deck that could only support two people standing very still. It looked out over Topanga State Park across the canyon, a stream of commuters tucked somewhere below. That view greeted me every morning as the sun rose over the ridge line and streamed into the cabin. Every bad day ended with that view and every good one started with it. 

This weekend, that little shack was listed for sale. Our rent for the nearly 8 years we lived there was $1900 a month. The estimated mortgage on the sale price is $8,300 per month, assuming you have a cool $280,000 for the down payment. We tried to negotiate with our landlord for years on how we could buy it, but when he said what he wanted to sell it for, we said “oh” with our whole faces and backed away.

When I would sit on that deck, looking out over the trails beyond, it was like seeing the future. A mile unfolding across the greenery in front of me. I could feel the footfalls beneath me, imagine the textures of dirt and the refuges of shade, I could picture the version of myself that reached the end of the trail overlooking the Pacific, legs pulsing and sweat beading. In that view, I knew exactly what lay ahead of me. 

When we were moving, looking for a home we could afford to buy, our laundry list of hopes and dreams included a view. I wanted to look out the windows and feel my soul being slingshotted to the farthest point possible, stretching it out and relieving the kinks and worries. The bigger the horizon, the more I could unfold and unwind. There’s speculation about why humans love a view, from being part of our base nature watching for predators to our more modern wants that the higher up you are, the more powerful you — the penthouse philosophy. The only thing that felt powerful about my top floor walk-up were my legs but power rarely lives on the 5th floor.

Of course, when you summit the mountain or skim the ridge, it’s a different power: one of self-sufficiency, accomplishment, and freedom. That last one, that’s what a view has always meant to me: that I could walk or sail or ride in that direction without end, without people, without feeling tied and tethered. But the view here, while vast and wild, makes me feel something else. With the towering mountains around us, the view here has me feeling cocooned, protected, sheltered by the giants in charge. Others here are better at contesting the might of those giants, but it's in their bowls and basins and wooded trails that I feel the best.

 As the town debates whether or not to pursue a study to determine where and if a solar array would make sense here, the views keep coming up. I’m for a solar array. I want to be part of the climate solution, and it’s been shown that having a solar array near your house has negligible impact on its value (and I happen to think in the not-so-far future that it will have a positive impact on the value). Also, if it’s by our house, I don’t care; they’re silent, not imposing, and frankly I think they’re cool. The naysayers in the town have their reasons, but the one I find the most sincere is the simple admission that they find solar arrays ugly. They believe the solar array will disrupt the views, and if they find solar arrays to be ugly, then it will indeed disrupt their view. I get it: I find our propane tank to be hideous and I photoshop it out of nearly every photo I take of the house. Ugly things things are ugly. I would very much rather there be a solar array behind my house than a propane tank. We like what we like.

But a view’s value is not only in its beauty— it’s also in its expanse. When we’re stressed, the aperture of our vision contracts; we get tunnel vision, and we inflict this on ourselves all the time by staring at a screen six inches from our face. While stress causes contraction, we can also use this function of vision in the opposite direction: when we switch to panoramic vision, expanding our view to see as much of our environment as possible, we are actively turning off the attentional and stress mechanisms that drive our internal states toward stress. By looking at a vista, we force ourselves to relax. 

Not to say an up-close view can’t suffice. I’ve never seen an apartment tour or a home tour where someone’s like, “and the kitchen looks directly at the linoleum siding of our neighbor’s house!” But you do hear people say, “I love looking out this window at all the plants.” I too love looking at plants. I also love looking at wood. When we were looking for a home, we wanted it to be made of wood. And I’m not talking just stick-built construction but the shiplap under drywall before Joanna Gaines painted it, the entire room paneling of the 1970s, the “well this is what we’ve got” cabins of the miners. I wanted a second little pig house entirely of sticks. When questioned on this, I don’t think my answers were ever much deeper than “I like how it looks,” but it turns out it follows the same neural pathway of “pictures of trees.”

In this systematic review of indoor experiments regarding the benefits of viewing nature, they cite ten studies that say just looking at and touching wood is good for you! (Touching wood, lol.) 

“The results illustrated that; less tension and fatigue were generated in the wooden rooms than in the non-wooden rooms when the participants did their work. In addition, the study also found that the wooden environments benefit the autonomic nervous system, respiratory system, and visual system. Moreover, wooden rooms play a valuable role in physiological regulation and ease function especially after a consecutive period of work. “

I never put two and two together. I wasn’t just looking for a view out the windows, but a view inside them. Something inside my little cavegirl brain was like, “I never want to see another unnatural material again. I want to be surrounded by logs and plants and fur and wool and leaves and rocks for AS FAR AND AS CLOSE AS THE EYE CAN SEE.” Because a view isn’t just a vista — it’s everything you see. The view of your room when you wake up, the view as you make your coffee, the view as you sit down at your desk, the view as you fold your laundry and lounge on the couch and exist day in and day out.

A woodchuck could never chuck as much wood as is in this house.

Everywhere I look in this house, there’s wood and plants. Everywhere I look outside of this house, there’s wood and plants. Every space I have curated in and around this house is made almost entirely of wood and plants. Because I “liked it.” But really because my anxiety-riddled subconscious was like, “babe — I have a plan,” and the plan worked. When I said I wanted a view, I had a vision.

What’s in your view now? When you lift your eyes from this screen, what do you see? Are you seeing enough of what you like, and if not, can you add more? We know now even pictures work. A simple succulent can reroute your day. Grocery store flowers, thrift store wooden bowls, roadside weed flowers — even if you are staring out the window at linoleum, all these things can make the view inside your home better, healthier, and make you more at ease. 

Changing even just that small view, the one right in front of you, might change your view in general.

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Since you all paid subscribers had to endure my latest pet trauma this past Wednesday, I wanted to share this update on Link. (Some of you saw this on Instagram.) Link went into surgery on Wednesday, the first step of which was for the surgeons to insert a finger into his butt to find exactly where the narrowing was before they began the operation. But with a woman’s pinky up his butt