Relationships Take Time

Remember your first encounter with someone who is now very close to you. You probably had an impression of them. Perhaps you liked them immediately. Perhaps you didn't. Either way, that first impression probably bears little resemblance to how you know them now, after countless conversations, shared experiences, misunderstandings, laughter, difficult moments and all the ordinary time spent together.

It takes time to really know someone.

And even after many years, there is always more to discover. If we remain curious, perhaps we never completely finish getting to know another person.

I've been thinking lately that our relationship with a place can be a little like this.

Of course, a relationship with trees, plants and wildlife can never be exactly the same as a human relationship. But I think they ask something similar of us—patience, consistency, curiosity and, most of all, time.

When I first came to live on this land, I remember referring to the possums, bush turkeys, kangaroos and other wildlife as "pests."

I'm not really sure where I got that idea from. Perhaps it was just the general rhetoric I'd picked up. I was planting a vegetable garden and young trees and became frustrated when something ate them, dug them up or trampled through them during the night.

It took me a while to realise that perhaps I had it the wrong way around.

These animals weren't intruding into my home. I had arrived in theirs. In fact, they had been living here long before me, part of an ecosystem that had evolved over countless generations, while I had arrived with my vegetable gardens, fences and ideas about how the land should behave.

Someone once told me that possums in our area were becoming a little like refugees. As the old trees disappear, so do the hollows they depend upon for shelter. Suddenly I began to see the possums around our house differently. Rather than trying to keep them away, I installed possum boxes around the property so they had somewhere else to live.

Them something shifted. They were no longer pests. We were simply learning how to cohabit this beautiful piece of land together.

And, strangely, as my relationship with the wildlife changed, so did my experience of living here.

Over time I began noticing things I had completely missed when I first arrived. I started recognising different birds by their calls and noticing how those sounds change with the seasons. I became familiar with the haunting howls of dingoes moving through the valley at night. I began noticing which flowers appear at particular times of year, when certain trees fruit, when the grasses dry, when the insects & bees emerge, and when particular birds suddenly return after months of absence.

None of this knowledge came quickly. It came from spending time here, in one place. From walking the same paths again and again. Sitting beneath the same trees. Waking before dawn and listening. Watching the stars and one season slowly become another. Belonging to a place isn't something that happens when we arrive; it develops through years of paying attention.

Perhaps this is how we come to know a place.

Not by visiting it once and deciding what it is, but by returning to it—again and again—until slowly, almost without noticing, it stops feeling like scenery around us. It becomes a relationship. Over time, it's not just that we come to know the land. Through adapting to its seasons, rhythms and other inhabitants, the land slowly changes us as well.

This is not only true of my home in the Currumbin Valley, but also of other places I return to around Australia and the world. Going back to these places can feel like a reunion with an old friend. I notice what has changed since I was last there, but I also recognise what has remained—a familiar path, a particular tree, the smell of the forest, the people I have come to know.

Perhaps there is something in this about how we travel too. So much modern travel is about seeing as much as possible—another town, another landmark, another country to tick off the list. But what if we travelled slower, stayed longer and returned to places we already knew? It might become less about sightseeing and more about relationship.

There would be an environmental benefit to travelling this way as well. Slower journeys and longer stays can reduce some of the impact created by constantly moving from place to place. But I think the deeper change is in our attitude. When somewhere stops being simply a destination and becomes a place we have a relationship with, perhaps we begin to care differently about what happens to it. We become interested not only in what the place can offer us, but in how we might tread more lightly while we are there.

Maybe this is another kind of travel altogether. Not travelling simply to collect experiences, but returning, listening and noticing. Allowing a place to reveal itself slowly, over years. Just as it takes time to truly know another person, perhaps it takes time to truly know a place.