A Year of Happy!
Inspired by a new year we follow a familiar path as we resolve to; spend more time with family & friends, learn something new, help others, eat better, exercise more, reduce stress, and save money. The list designed to inspire us to be our better selves often does just the opposite and creates more stress within the first month of the year. If only there was an easy way to achieve these resolutions! Well, “There is a garden for that!”
If you want to spend more time with family & friends, and save money the garden outside your door, provides a ready space to gather and enjoy each other. Working in the garden, entertaining, relaxing and visiting are all available and affordable within just a few steps.
If you want to learn something new, there is an unending knowledge of the natural world to explore. If you help a child discover the scent of plants in a garden and see eyes light up in surprise, it will make your day. You will also be mentoring a new generation in ways of connecting to nature.
Michael Pollan author of Food Rules, writes “Eat food, mostly plants!” The odds of achieving the goal to eat better, increases greatly with a vegetable garden. Your creativity may be stimulated as new, interesting crops, such as rainbow chard flourish in your garden, spurring you to make fun, nutritious meals to share with family and friends.
Working in your garden gets you exercising: rake the leaves for a cardio session, rotate your flower pots and you will stretch and bend, move bags of mulch and you’re lifting weights.
Reduce your stress levels and increase your optimism while walking around your garden noting the new shoots and buds that will be opening soon. The garden landscape helps connect you to the natural rhythms of the seasons and cycles of life.
Oh, and there is one vitamin that you can take without worry of harmful side effects, Vitamin N: Use daily, outdoors in nature. Go for a nature walk, watch birds, observe trees. Practice respectful outdoor behavior in solitude or take with family and friends. (Read more about this in “The Nature Principle” by Richard Louv)
All those popular resolutions can be achieved in a garden. What could be easier? Cultivate those resolutions and find a Year of Happy!