By Jane Gordon Julien
April 23, 2025
A friend of mine’s husband called his former therapist the other day and said, in a tone I can imagine was of desperation, “What should I do?”
If you don’t care about American citizens being deported and jailed in El Salvador, if you don’t care about the safety nets the government has built over the years disappearing, if you don’t care about the progressive demise of Social Security, care about the price of food. Care about federal cuts to state budgets that may result in your property taxes rising. Care about your retirement investments diminishing.
Plenty is happening that directly affects all of us. So how does the collective ‘we’ hold it together emotionally as the world we once knew changes, in ways yet to be seen?
The therapist had some good advice for my friend’s husband. One of his first thoughts:
Walk in the woods. A walk in your neighborhood won’t cut it (unless you live in a forest. I won’t ask). A walk on a boardwalk at the beach might sort of cut it. But a contemplative walk among the trees, which have stories to tell, evidently does much for the soul.
And for anxiety.
The other piece of advice that I thought particularly pertinent was this: view the news objectively. I know I haven’t been doing that; I’m internalizing just about everything, from the market’s highs and lows to the story about a seriously disturbed guy having sex with a corpse in the Manhattan subway. So instead of “Oh my goodness!” or “Holy shit!”, say to yourself, “That’s interesting.”
And move on.
I’m looking for a forest to take a walk. And “that’s interesting” is my new mantra.
As Claudia Sheinbaum, Mexico’s impressive new president – and its first female head of state – has said in the face of our country’s chaos, “It’s always important to keep a cool head.”
It’s good advice for these erratic days.
Let me know if you take a walk in the woods. Take mental notes of what you see. Write those notes down and share the details: the shape of a leaf, the budding of a wildflower, the intensity of a squirrel back on its hind legs nibbling an acorn. These small noticings calm the mind and awaken the writer within.