Love for life means going outside before you reach for your phone

In my book Why I Love, the practice for loving life is very concrete: I do something every day that makes me feel alive, even when the weather is bad. I notice what is beautiful on my way to places: the shifting light, the architecture, the trees, and the people. And when I feel down or numb, I go outside before I reach for my phone.

I grew up spending summers at a remote cabin near the Finnish border, with no electricity and barely running water. We fished, we smoked our catch, and we grew our own potatoes. In the winter in northern Sweden, it could reach forty below zero, and when you opened the door ice crystals hung frozen in the air. As a young child, I wanted to touch and explore everything.

But around age eight, my grandfather passed away and my parents sat us down at the kitchen table to announce their divorce. I did not know how to process that pain, so I made an unconscious decision to shut down and feel nothing. When you numb yourself to pain, you also numb yourself to the living world; for the next seven years, I stayed indoors behind a glowing monitor, convinced there was nothing worth seeing outside.

The turning point came when I was fifteen, sitting in a dark room playing a computer game, when two visitors knocked on our door. They pointed at the sky and asked if I didn't think the clouds and apple trees were too beautiful to have happened by chance. After they left, a question lodged itself in my chest: why was I sitting in a dark room completing virtual quests when the real physical world was waiting right outside?

For a long time after that, I thought loving life required dramatic travel to exotic countries. But the real realization came much later: you can be an explorer anywhere. True adventure is simply where you place your attention: the angle of sunlight on an old brick building on your morning commute, the sensation of rain on your skin, or a street in your own neighborhood you have never walked down.

If you take one practical exercise from this video, make it this rule: whenever you feel anxious, restless, or down, step outside for ten minutes before you reach for your phone. Not instead of—just before. Walk around the block, look up at the sky, feel the temperature of the air, and then pick up your screen if you still want it. In my experience, ten minutes in the physical world completely resets your nervous system.

You can pre-order Why I Love through the link down in the comments. What is one small detail right outside your front door that you have stopped noticing lately? Let me know in the comments below.