The 2018 How-To Guide: Start with your head.
If you’re half as busy as we magazine obsessives are, you’re probably looking back at a very full 2017 with not nearly enough breathers. By some miracle, we manage to masochistically fill every break in the busy with still more busyness. My best advice for your mental wellbeing in 2018? You should… not do that. It’s about time we embraced the opportunities for pause. Take it from a serial mingler who spends not a waking moment in silence or solitude: Giving time to the quiet moments really does render the loud ones more productive and, often, more fulfilling. To make the most of those quiet moments, we recommend you find some nature to commune with.
Take a walk. Not a brisk one, and not with any real destination in mind. Don’t do it for heart health, or to train (whatever that even means). Just…take a walk, and do it somewhere that pleases you. We recommend a chilly spring morning stroll through Wing Haven Gardens or McGill Rose Garden. Hit any of the metro area’s greenways or parks. These spaces are actually intentionally designed to give Charlotteans a break from their typical surroundings. Use them.
If it’s a more natural nature that, for you, really invites reflection, there’s plenty of that around Charlotte, too. Find some woods to walk in. Anne Springs Close Greenway is, well, really close by, and there’s a little body of water just to the north—you may have heard of it—that offers plenty of immersion in nature. And while the lake can offer a special kind of serenity, there’s a more acute kind of stillness in our favorite unstill waters: If you’ve never been fly fishing, find a river as soon as possible. There is no more therapeutic sport.
