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If I could stop time, I wood.
Splendid isolation: how I stopped time by sitting in a forest for 24 hours. "When you're actually in it, the reality of the solo is, at least at first, one of total boredom. I cannot stress enough how little there is to do when you have confined yourself to the inside of a small circle of stones and sticks in a forest. But it is an instructive kind of boredom, insofar as boredom is the raw and unmediated experience of time. It is considered best practice not to have a watch, and to turn off your phone and keep it somewhere in the bottom of a bag so as to avoid the temptation to constantly check how long you've been out and how long you have left. And as you become untethered from your accustomed orientation in time – from always knowing what time it is, how long you have to do the thing you're doing, when you have to stop doing it to do the next thing – you begin to glimpse a new perspective on the anxiety that arises from that orientation. Because this anxiety, which amounts to a sort of cost-benefit analysis of every passing moment, is a quintessentially modern predicament."
"The word that comes to mind is immanence – a term I learned as a philosophy undergraduate and which I did not remotely understand until I began to have these experiences of being alone in nature. In his 1836 essay Nature, American poet Ralph Waldo Emerson identifies precisely this sublime phenomenon. "The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister," he writes, "is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable. I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to them." It's a phenomenon that he views as both an apprehension of the divine and a return to the child's perception of the world. "In the woods," he writes, "a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child."
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"One of Roberts's major themes was the idea that our particular civilisation, at our particular time, was unusual in not having as part of its cultural repertoire some ritual whereby during periods of change or upheaval people went out alone into nature. When he talked about the practice of the wilderness solo, he talked about it in such terms – as a ritual whereby you stepped out of the flux of the world, in order to gain some perspective on the flux, and your place within it.
A word he used a lot in talking about his work, and in describing the experience and value of the nature solo, was "re-enchantment". He was of the opinion that most people, most of the time, lived life in a state of disenchantment. What he wanted to do, above all, was to help people strip away the layers of hard rationalism that accrued around the adult mind, so that they could return to a more childlike engagement with the world. And in reaching this state, he said, this place of re-enchantment, we could come to see ourselves not as separate from and in control of nature, but as part of it."
posted by storybored on Apr 15, 2026 at 6:32 PM
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Try retirement...
Tuesday is not very different than Saturday. That out of time feeling is real.
Have done some multi-day backpacking trips, (in my younger days), and you have no idea what day it is, (other than day 3, we are camping at that place).
I got a lot of this on cross country driving trips. Even though I went from camping to staying in hotels, that sense of time and space distortion is real and noticeable. Wish I had the time and ability to grab my tent and go meditate in the woods. Would probably be good for me...
Maybe next year. Yellowstone calls...
posted by Windopaene at 7:02 PM
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That's nice. I'm glad he got to have that experience. I've been lucky enough to have had this type of thing many times in a lifetime of outdoorsing, from multiday (or week) backpacking or canoeing trips, to overnight stargazing, to sailing or even just a day in a river fishing.
First you connect to nature, and then, if you're fortunate, you connect to yourself, and that's where time stops, when you're of the world not just in the world. magic.
posted by OHenryPacey at 7:34 PM
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OHenryPacey - I was just coming here to say something similar.
I moved to a state where, within 3 hours, I can be in open wilderness that is outside of cellphone range. It takes about 20 minutes to adjust, and then my brain just.... relaxes. It's hard to fully express if you haven't been in a situation like this -- there is a strange difference between choosing not to check your phone and not hav a functioning phone to check. And the contrast of how it FEELS - sometimes at home, I have trouble settling down to just read a book, my brain is jumping from thing to thing, but outdoors? That far away from 1,000 potential distractions? I sit for hours just watching and listening to the infinite awe-inspiring changes caused by wind blowing through trees, and I don't realize how long I've just been sitting. It's like chiropractic for the soul.
posted by Silvery Fish at 7:46 PM
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And then for a long time I thought about my son, of how he existed in a thin space between reality and fantasy... And I thought with a pang of how I was always hurrying him – to get dressed, to get out the door for school, to finish his dinner, to get ready for bed – and of how heedlessly I was inflicting upon him my own anxious awareness of time as an oppressive force. How before he knew where he was, his own childhood would have receded into the past, and he too would be out of the secret level of childhood and into the laterally scrolling world of adulthood.
This is a very good piece.
I've never done this kind of "solo," but I've done a great deal of solo hiking and a couple of solo bike tours. Being alone in such a fashion is quite distinct and definitely just a little magical. Concentrating it with proscribed lack of motion or activity strikes me as a kind of mini Vipassana. How wonderful.
posted by Smedly, Butlerian jihadi at 7:53 PM
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Very cool, thank you
posted by knobknosher at 8:15 PM
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I thought with a pang of how I was always hurrying him – to get dressed, to get out the door for school, to finish his dinner, to get ready for bed – and of how heedlessly I was inflicting upon him my own anxious awareness of time as an oppressive force
Oooof.
I need to have this taped to my door. Getting the kids ready in the morning is such a challenge, and I'm almost always snappy and tetchy by the time we get out. I am mostly aware of this, and chide myself by imagining an episode of Bluey where the parents act like I currently am, and what a huge bummer of a show it would be.
posted by Jon Mitchell at 10:39 PM
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Intentional or not, a full day in nature in one spot - especially the part from dusk till dawn - is a folkloric method to encounter magic. Spirits or parts of your psyche or what have you.
posted by julianeon at 11:16 PM
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I get this at the seashore (I am fortunate enough to live somewhere where deserted coasts are fairly accessible). But now I am tempted to find a spot off one of the local tracks where a person could lie around for a day - again, blessed by geography here, it's not as hard as the UK. I know the feeling, I had not thought about intensifying it through a whole day and night in one place.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 3:00 AM
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Done a number of multi-week backpacking trips - about day 3, it settles in. No obligations, no wifi, carrying everything you need on your back, getting up when you awake, and going to sleep when bushed. It is soul enriching.
posted by whatevernot at 3:59 AM
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thank you for posting this.
posted by Sebmojo at 6:08 AM
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Jon Mitchell I had a Buddhist friend pass on something to me that her teacher told her after she had accident running to catch a bus: rushing is a form of violence. I've thought about this a lot because I often wait until the last minute for everything and then rush and trip (sometimes literally) all over my self. That's self-inflicted of course, and rushing can't always be avoided even when not self-inflected, but the idea still rings true to me. It does indeed feel like one has been slapped on the face or something like that -- and the emotions that might accompany getting slapped seem pretty spot-on for the emotions that accompany stressful, chaotic rushing
posted by treepour at 9:26 AM
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This is reminding me of Le Guin's _The Beginning Place_, which I remember as being about organic time.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 2:32 AM
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