R & R, Wellbeing, and the Library Porch as a Healing Space
We set out to test whether walking together could boost faculty wellbeing. What we discovered instead? The library porch might be Furman’s secret weapon against the all-too-familiar end of semester slump.
Last month, we launched “Roam and Reflect”–or R&R, as we like to call it—an experimental Tuesday/Wednesday walking program grounded in research suggesting that just 10 minutes of daily walking, especially with others, can reduce anxiety, spark creativity, improve problem-solving, and strengthen community bonds. Many thanks to the small and mighty group of faculty and staff who joined us throughout October to roam campus and chat (or visit on the porch or walk in companionable silence).
We’ll bring R&R back in the spring, but we couldn’t wait to share the program’s most unexpected lesson: if you need a reminder of why we do this work, head to the library porch.
The Hub Effect: Library Porch as Healing Space
Yes, the research on walking holds true—movement matters, and changing your physical location can lift your mood. But what we discovered during our R&R walks is that the library porch itself has restorative power. Pause on the porch for just five minutes and you’ll witness the rhythms of campus life: students huddled over projects, celebrating registration victories, or hiding out in plain sight with earbuds or headphones helping them concentrate. Colleagues you haven’t seen in weeks may be crossing paths, walking side-by-side with students, solving teaching puzzles or swapping life advice. There’s always coffee or tea nearby–because TLC (aka The Library Coffee Shop)! It’s ethnographic observation as self-support—an opportunity to reconnect with our shared purpose and to remember our part in something larger, more vibrant, and more long-term than our individual tasks that feel so urgent but that are ultimately less important than our internal equanimity or our collegial connections with one another. As an added bonus, reap the benefits of getting outside and being in nature in your short campus commute to the library porch, a habit that Jane Goodall reminds us is essential for flourishing.
You might even argue that the library porch is a healing space, if in fact “Healing is a holistic, transformative process of repair and recovery in mind, body, and spirit resulting in positive change, finding meaning, and movement towards self-realization of wholeness, regardless of the presence or absence of disease” (Firth et al., 2015, p. 12 qtd. in Dubose et.al, 2018). More recent research, although applied to patients with mood disorders, provides insight to the porch as a healing space according to Figure 2 below (Yan et al., 2024). Many of the phenomena we witnessed during our R&R experiment are present in this hypothesis about how to build a healing structure:
We’ve all shown up consistently this fall semester—and showing up is its own form of success. As we head toward Thanksgiving break, consider what helps you stay full or the structures in your life that support healing–yours, your family’s, your students’. Maybe it’s a Tuesday DH lunch with your trusted crew or a quick walk with colleagues. Maybe it’s crossing unwritten but ever-present “expectations” off your to-do list. Maybe it’s as simple as five minutes on the library porch watching campus come alive in the morning, reset at 5 PM, or be totally silent all day long on a dreary, rainy afternoon.
