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YOUR HEALTH
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Pictured here are bikes for loan at the author’s favorite vacation destination, Pirate’s Point in Little Cayman. She visited with her family in March 2020 and managed to get home a day before the borders closed to tourists. They remain unopened.
in the Covid era By: Stacie Charbonneau Hess
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”— Mark Twain
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f you’re like me and most of my friends, you are happier when there are things to look forward to. Birthday parties and barbecues in summer, ski trips and Caribbean vacations in winter. While some of this is still possible, with Covid-era accommodations of course, a lot of our former gallivanting is off-limits. Road trips take precedence over airplanes, sticking close to home over visiting a neighbor. It can all get rather wearisome, really, and here we are coming up on one year of rethinking the way we socialize, and the way we travel. If you are of retirement age, perhaps you’re extra angry and feel short-changed at having to stay home in chilly New England during the sometimes wretched winter-weather months. To cope, I have compiled a list of ways you can travel – or plan to travel – safely, right now, without waiting another day. If you give yourself over to the planning, with hope and
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anticipation, the brain is even tricked, outwitting winter with dreams of light and warmth. Think of planning travel and embarking on local, short trips as taking care of your mental health. Instead of focusing on what you cannot do, your mind focuses on creation. Lifestyle writer for the New York Times Melissa Kirsch writes in her article, the “The Importance of Anticipation,” that “We all need things to look forward to.” She quotes a researcher from The Journal of Experimental Psychology, Christian Waugh who confirms that “[Anticipation] promotes approach thinking, so the feeling that you’re going toward something you want or desire, as opposed to going away from something you fear, which gives a sense of well-being.” In yoga we say this more simply: “What you focus on gets stronger.” This becomes a mantra for creating something anew, something that has not yet materialized for you. Here are a
March 2021 | The South Coast Insider
few ways you can focus your attention on creating something beautiful, something hopeful, something that can get you through the rainiest, sleetiest, windiest, wretched-est of winter days.
Take an “Awe-Walk”
A friend of mine, Josie, is a public health advocate and sent me this awesome new study about Awe Walks. It focused on older adults (60s, 70s, and 80s) in the San Francisco Bay Area. The study showed the difference between people who just walked for “exercise” and those who were given the task of finding “awe” in their everyday walks. The study was performed over eight weeks, with two groups: the control group and the “awe-seekers” who were told by the researchers to try to seek out new places to walk each day, to cultivate a sense of child-like wonder, notice the details – in other words, get out of their own self-focused thought-
