Nature has a soothing effect on us.

I often wonder why do all the songs, stories, and poems describe peace, love, and all other states of beautiful emotions in form of nature. As a conjecture to my thoughts, I have realized what important role nature plays in my life. Nature in its simplest form holds up such an apt reflection of the human world. It keeps our lives vibrant with the different shades of green on leaves, myriad of colorful flowers, different shades of blue in the sky and oceans. It gives us the comfort that a mother gives to her children.

We are all stuck in our households for the past few months and there is least interaction with the pollution on roads, the painful honking of cars, the sizzling rays of the sun directly on our face, and also the unknown human beings we used to see on roads every day. As happy as I am about the fact that my interaction is minimum with the aforementioned things, I am as sad about the fact that I can’t go out for a walk without any specific direction, I can’t keep staring at a beautiful flower along the roadside, I can’t look at random people and guess what they are thinking in their mind and most notably I miss eating street foods.

The only escape that I now have is my balcony which is the maximum I can go near nature. My Father put a lot of brain and effort in decorating the balcony and it was worth it. It is like a small garden on the ninth floor. Apart from worrying about when will this pandemic end, we are also hooked to our mobile phones and laptops and it is really exhausting for our eyes and our mind. Thus, the balcony is like the only place in my house where I don’t feel suffocated. I like reading books sitting in my balcony nowadays or just stare at the sky which surprises me every day by changing its shade of colors and I also admire the way the sun sets making the golden ray fall on the white walls of our building.

When the birds come flapping their wings and sit on the iron railing of our balcony it feels like a friend of mine is back from work and it has loads to tell about what happened out there today. The faint breeze blowing through my hair is like the only link between me and the essence of being out. The way all the residents communicate with each other through the balcony makes it feel like a common passage or a hallway where people come for a minute of escape from their daily chores in the home may be to have a smoke, or to feel the good weather, or to just ensure that other people still exist apart from the same faces they see every day inside their houses. All of this reminded me of the poem ‘Daffodil’ written by William Wordsworth where he highlights how nature has a soothing effect on us. I totally agree with the poet as he explains how immense joy can be derived through these brief experiences of nature as he wrote :

“For oft, when on my couch I lie

In a vacant or in pensive mood,

They flash upon that inward eye

Which is the bliss of solitude;

And then my heart with pleasure fills,

And dances with the daffodils.”