everyone’s sitting outside again

the science of springtime, memory, nervous system belonging, and why we gather when the sun comes back

we bring our books, our tangled thoughts, our dogs, our coffee. we bring the version of ourselves that doesn’t need to explain. and we sit. in parks, on rooftops, under trees, next to strangers. we lift our faces toward the light. and something in us exhales. when the sun returns we re-enter the field of attachment among strangers and branches and benches.

deep in the brain, the systems that track time begin to reorient. hormones shift quietly, melatonin fading, serotonin waking, vitamin d returning to the bloodstream like a memory. you look up and realise you’re surrounded by other people who also just… came. not to do anything. just to be. sunlight is a hormonal permission to return to ourselves. the first warm day feels like waking up. it’s the moment your jaw unclenches and you realise you’ve been holding your breath since november.

but light alone doesn’t explain the pull. it doesn’t explain why benches fill. why lawns become living rooms. why strangers begin to mirror each other’s postures without meaning to. to understand that, we have to look at where we are. open fields. tall trees. visible edges. the soft distance of a skyline.

landscape preference theory tells us that humans evolved to feel safe in places with both refuge and perspective. places where you can see without being seen. places where your nervous system doesn’t have to negotiate its right to exist. and when the environment whispers yes, something shifts. your internal alarm, the sympathetic system, quiets. breath deepens. muscles loosen. oxytocin begins to rise, slowly, without asking.

co-regulation happens when the body feels safe enough to be with others, it leans toward rhythm. pacing. shared breath. mirror neurons, those specialised cells that fire when we witness another’s movement, offer us resonance. someone stretches and your own shoulders release. someone laughs and something lifts inside you, before you even know why. oxytocin doesn’t just bind us, it lowers the guard just enough that we can hear someone say “i’m tired” and feel it like our own voice. shared space is a form of architecture. it shapes us as much as walls ever could.

we bloom because something ancient in us remembers how. to gather in the light is to say, i will let your presence rearrange mine.

some days, i sit in the sun and don’t speak. i just listen. to the rhythm of someone else’s story. to the silence between their sentences. there’s something about sunlight that softens us. that makes space for breath, for grief, for memory. the kind that lives in the body. in temperature. in scent. in the sound of cut grass. jasmine. sunscreen on someone’s shoulder. scent reaches the limbic system, the brain’s emotional core, without passing through logic. it brings us back whole.

that’s why, when spring comes, we go to the parks. we sit on benches. lie on grass. gather near warmth like animals returning to instinct. it’s not just about good weather. it’s about what the body remembers. that sun heals. that presence restores. that we are allowed to pause.

spring reminds us how to feel again.

but it doesn’t last. that’s what draws us out of our homes, toward the warmth, toward each other. after months of grey, the light returns, soft at first, then golden. the sun lingers a little longer. the air shifts. and so do we.

cherry blossoms bloom for only a handful of days, then fall, quiet and unresisting, back to the earth. and still, every year, we gather beneath them, to feel it while it’s here.

there’s a japanese term for this: mono no aware, the tender ache of impermanence. what makes a moment sacred isn’t that it lasts. it’s that it can’t.

so we pause. we soften.

we find each other in patches of sun. not to hold on, but to witness. we don’t just welcome spring, we undergo it. a thaw, a lightness. a day that won’t return, but was shared.

as the blossoms rise from sleep, something in us does too.

“spring has returned. the earth is like a child that knows poems by heart.”

— rilke