The harvest supermoon and the rituals we didn't plan.

The moon was, objectively, very large and very orange. We stood on the pavement outside our house in London and looked at it for about four minutes, which is longer than most people look at anything that isn't a screen. My daughter said it looked like something you could reach up and touch. I said that was exactly what it looked like. We stood there until a bus went past and the moment ended naturally, and then we went back inside.

I've been thinking about that four minutes since. It had several qualities that I rarely encounter in planned activities:

We both saw exactly the same thing. There was nothing to achieve. Nothing was being assessed. Neither of us was performing for the other. The pleasure was complete in itself.

As a biologist I am interested in what these conditions do to the nervous system. They are, essentially, the conditions under which the default mode network functions most effectively: low task demand, shared attention, intrinsic rather than extrinsic reward. The four minutes of moon-watching were, neurologically, an optimal experience for both of us.

Those four minutes of moon-watching were not a nature experience in any cultivated sense. We were on a pavement. There were cars. The bus that ended it was not a poetic intrusion — it was a bus. The conditions were ordinary. What was not ordinary was the quality of the four minutes.