What is your sympathetic nervous system up to?

On noise, and cities, and window shopping houses on remote islands.

People who live in the city of New York write a lot about the heat, the smell of the garbage, the noise. It's part of their love song to the city. For me, it's the opposite: sometimes, the city is a thing that must be endured, the endurance a price I have to pay for all the things within it, for the climbing centres and restaurants and friends and tennis courts. For the privilege of being able to walk to work, for example. The price of this is:

• the rumble of a helicopter circling when I leave the flat, and when I get home again
• the crossroads at the top of the hill where the streets funnel the cold wind directly at my ears
• the noise of cars and the choking smell of an old van going up the hill
• the crush of bodies at the traffic lights
• a sudden jackhammer tearing open my thoughts, the sound following me down the street
• hard tarmac underfoot and a loose paving slab that shoots cold water up the back of my calf, which drips into my shoe

If this sounds like a litany of complaints, then perhaps it is. But there are also the trees in the square with the cafe that sells four kinds of salad in a box, the light-filled office and the people in it, the river to sit by or run along. It is more, I think, a plea for us all: to notice the sensory environment we've made for ourselves. Where is the body situated, and how does it feel about that? What assaults it, as we take it about our business?

What I want to say next is that I think all of this is different for me, heightened, but I don't know how to say this without talking about neurodiversity in a way I am neither qualified nor confident to do. I will just say that it doesn't seem to be normal to spend two hours plus Land Registry fees working out who to contact to stop the sound of the burglar alarm in the next street, nor to stand in the kitchen and scream because the scaffolders have started again and there's no way to escape the noise.

So: your experience may be different – is probably different – to my experience. Maybe you don't notice the sirens and the sudden ambush of other people's perfumes; your thalamus directs these away from your conscious mind, doing its filtering well and invisibly.

There's evidence, though, that this piling-on of sensory experiences does have an impact, whether or not we notice it. Children learn less well in noisy classrooms, although their perception of the noise doesn't correlate with its impact on their development or learning. Chronic noise exposure contributes to 48,000 new cases of heart disease across Europe every year; the European Environmental Agency ranks noise second only to air pollution as the environmental exposure most harmful to public health.

There are some noises we're hard-wired to pay attention to, to understand as a threat: this is what screaming and sirens have in common, for instance. We may not consciously process these signals as threats, but our body is preparing us to deal with them. Some people suggest this is part of the reason that covid had such an impact on our mental health (along, of course, with the other, obvious reasons). The constant presence of alarm signals in our environment; face masks and signs telling us to stand two metres away from other people, to wash our hands; people crossing the road as we approached: the subconscious mind notices all this, even if it doesn't bother to alert us, and passes it straight to our nervous system. Our bodies are vigilant, prepared, distracted, even if our minds aren't aware of that.

What is all of this to say? Not, I think, that we should all move to the countryside immediately – although there is an old shooting lodge going on the Isle of Hoy for a very reasonable price, with walls around the grounds: no scaffolding going up here. It's more of a nod to our environment, to notice what's in it, to notice how we feel, how available focus and flow is to us. And to give our bodies what they need: a walk in the woods. A few hours in a library. Some time spent staring at a plain wall.

Cities can be bad for our mental health. So can - news to no-one - working long hours, staying stressed for ages, not having the community that we need around us. There's a lovely quote from adrienne maree brown in this episode of On Being that I'm thinking about a lot at the moment:

"We were given some things about the world from people who knew less than we do now, so what do we want to hold on to and what do we want to evolve?"

The things that we accept as necessary, that we don't choose to question, that we force ourselves to endure through our lack of scrutiny. That's what I'm evolving.

For a while, inspired by Ross Gay's wonderful Book of Delights, I've been noticing my own delights and writing them down. I shared a few with some friends recently and they said such lovely things, I thought I'd start including one here.

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September (3)

A DANCE

We had got lost, but not very lost, and we were making our way back to the road we’d intended to be on, which happened to take us past a column covered – all thirty metres of it – in beautiful carvings, and also past really a lot of ruins. Bits of foundation and arches were strewn around next to more columns patched up with brick between the marble and balanced, impossibly, three below a crossbeam of more patched marble, then three more columns above that, the whole structure supporting nothing and supported by nothing, extending into the empty space above the remains of this emperor’s palace.

As we were winding our way through and above and past all these ruins, stopping sometimes to point to things – a woman leaning out of a glassless window to take a photo, the room behind her entirely gold; bits of the Forum; interesting lumps of marble – we heard music.

Closer up, the music clarified, distinguished itself from the traffic and the sirens: a young man playing swooping songs on an electric violin on the road we had meant to follow, which, it turned out, had the Colosseum at one end of it and the Forum across the way and beautiful, tall, shapely trees along the length of it as well as the column and the gold room and the remains of the emperor’s palace.

I stood there in the gentle rain, Ben with his arms around me, both listening to the soar of the violin and looking at all the things to be looked at, including three girls dancing, joining hands and stepping backwards and forwards to give each of them a turn coming up to the arms of the other two, then stepping back into their triangle formation, releasing hands and spinning, smiling the whole time.