The power of a “silent walk”
Starting conversations, cartoon rejections, and your higher purpose (Issue #320)
For the last three months, I’ve spent most of my days on a college campus in the beautiful state of Vermont. I walk to work past a placid pond, beneath trees that chirp with birds — especially now that the frost is behind us, and the warmer months loom. Do you want to know the one thing that has helped me, a city girl, appreciate this natural environment once the novelty wore off? Leaving my headphones at home. Some people call it the “silent walk.”
While my own silent walks have opened my eyes to the ways that hawks float and chickadees chirp, the practice offers significant mental health benefits, namely stress reduction. On an anecdotal level, I’ve found that it’s one of the few ways that I can successfully “wind down” after a day of writing, teaching, or staring at a screen. Or, in the words of Rael Cahn, Phd, MD, it releases my brain from the “default mode network,” which often keeps us from being fully immersed in our surroundings. As Dr. Om Patil writes on Medium, spending time in green spaces can also lower blood pressure, and even improve sleep quality. Japanese “forest bathing” — the mere act of spending time immersed in green spaces — has been proven to promote cancer-fighting proteins.
For many of us who rely on laptops, phones, and apps throughout the day, it can be easy to reach for those same devices when we need to relax — if they solve our productivity issues, the thinking goes, they must solve our stress, too. But just as spending the first hour of your day screen free will have an outsize effect on your inner peace, leaving the phone and headphone at home while you head out for a walk will return you to a saner place in record time. I’ve found that I don’t even need nature for this: In New York, I much prefer to listen to the cityscape than a podcast when I’m walking around. And it’s proven a more sustainable solution than all those morning routine videos.
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📚 What else we’re reading
- Consider presenting your work to your team or boss (no matter what you do) with the intention of starting a conversation rather than simply getting approval. ()
- In honor of the New Yorker’s 100th anniversary, cartoonist shares his early rejection letters after submitting to the magazine in the ’80s — along with the ultimate compliment you can give a cartoonist: “I laughed at a cartoon — then realized it was yours.”
- A former New York Times columnist shares his process for using ChatGPT as a “super-thesaurus” for finding perfect words and idioms (e.g. “give me 100 words for all the shades of ‘outrage’ from least to most extreme.”)
📅 Your daily dose of practical wisdom
The purpose of a schedule is not to turn you into an automaton, but to remind you of your higher purpose. ()
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Edited by Scott Lamb
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