61 Years of Observation, Experience, and Healing

Why Space, Movement, and Nature Matter More Than I Realized

The sky lit up during a storm, a quiet reminder that light can still break through dark moments.

When I was a little girl, I feared forces I could not understand. Now I see how deeply children absorb the fears of the world around them. What once felt overwhelming no longer has power over me in the same way. I have changed. My understanding has changed. My relationship with life, death, and the unknown has changed.

When I was a child, I absorbed fear from the world around me, just like children do now.

I remember being deeply afraid of things I did not fully understand. I feared Russia. I feared cancer. I do not remember one single event that caused those fears. It was likely something I heard on the news, on the radio, in adult conversations, or picked up from the emotional atmosphere around me. Children absorb more than many adults realize.

As I reflect on childhood then compared to childhood now, I see an important difference.

Back then, even when fear entered my world, I still had space.

I could go outside. I could ride my bike. I could walk the train tracks. I could play down by the river and splash through the shallow water under the bridge. I could go ice skating. I could play in a field. I could wade through the pond at the Sand Dunes hunting for tadpoles and polliwogs. I could get up close and personal with nature—even sitting on the front steps, talking to the heavens during thunderstorms.

There was room to breathe. Room for my body to move, for my mind to wander, for my imagination to run wild, and for my system to begin processing life. I did not know that was what was happening at the time. I only know now, looking back, how blessed I was to have it.

That realization strikes me deeply.

Even with severe trauma, I still had access to something healing. I had open space. I had movement. I had nature. I had distance from the noise. I had moments where my body and mind could begin to recover, even if I did not yet understand what healing was. I was able to recalibrate.

Today, many children are growing up in a very different environment.

This does not mean every child in the past had freedom, and it does not mean every child today is without support. Pain, neglect, trauma, and hardship have always existed. But many children today are living with a kind of constant input that earlier generations did not experience in the same way.

Children now are often surrounded by nonstop noise, screens, stimulation, fear-based messaging, confusion, and contradiction. They may experience pain in their homes, schools, relationships, or inner worlds, and then have almost no true outlet for processing it. Instead of running into a field, riding a bike until the nervous system settles, or lying in the grass watching the sky, many are sitting indoors, connected to devices, absorbing more and more.

Information is everywhere. Signals are everywhere. Fear is everywhere. Distraction is everywhere.

But where is the stillness? Where is the space? Where is the natural outlet for the body to discharge what the child is carrying?

That is what concerns me.

A child does not only need protection from harmful experiences. A child also needs access to what helps the system return to itself. A child needs nature. A child needs movement. A child needs imagination. A child needs quiet. A child needs room to simply be. A child needs recalibration.

Without those things, what happens to all that fear, confusion, grief, overstimulation, and emotional buildup?

It does not just disappear.

It settles into the body. It shapes the mind. It influences identity. It affects how a person learns to relate to the world, to stress, to truth, to safety, to their families, and to themselves.

And that makes me wonder what many of today’s children will carry into adulthood.

Not because they are weak. Not because they are flawed. But because many are being asked to develop in an environment that gives them too little space to regulate, recover, and reconnect.

When we talk about children’s well-being, we cannot only talk about education, achievement, behavior, or screen time in a shallow way. We have to ask deeper questions.

Do children have room to breathe? Do they have room to move? Do they have access to nature? Do they have quiet? Do they have truth? Do they have healthy information? Do they have any space at all to begin healing from what life has already placed on them?

Looking back, I can now see that one of the greatest gifts of my childhood was not that it was free from fear and trauma. It was that there was still enough living space around that fear and trauma for healing to begin.

That feels worth remembering.

And it feels worth protecting for the children of today.