After a very busy year workwise with breaks to Sardinia, Croatia and France thrown in culminating in a number of business trips in November and December, followed by an enjoyable series of Christmas celebrations with family and friends, (during which I pulled a muscle in my back and twisted my knee again!) what of all the possible activities did I choose to do to relax over the holidays?
I built or rather extended a rockery in our garden. Not you would have thought very relaxing. It involved Googling how to design a rock garden then digging, moving topsoil, laying some small stones for drainage, building a path, rolling heavy rocks from across the garden (where they had got hidden in undergrowth) and then some planting. The finishing touch was a small antique white stone hippo brought for a very good price at the local garden centre.
A crazy way to wind down at first sight, but then I realised as I thought more about it that actually the activity and the result is both rewarding and therapeutic - a complete antidote to overworking and then over indulging in food and wine. Even my back and knee seem fine.
Rock gardens or alpine gardens date back to early Chinese and Japanese culture becoming very popular in Victorian times. See this Brief History which comments that The Chinese, especially, have a tradition of mountain worship and rockery in gardens to recreate mountain scenes and these can be seen as early as the late Yin and early Zhou dynasties (1600 BC- 771 BC). They create a space in a garden which can be both relaxing and calming - somewhere you can contemplate.
As I thought back over the year of 2018 and how to approach the new year which is just around the corner I realised that I had, perhaps accidentally, hit upon one of the things which is so important in our busy professional working lives – the ability to find ways to get away from everything for a time and put things into their proper perspective – even if it involves hard physical labour!
It seems gardening can reduce stress more than relaxing with a good book – see this article which says in an experiment subjects were asked to perform a stressful task and then asked to either perform 30 minutes of gardening in their allotment gardens or 30 minutes of reading. While both groups experienced a decrease in stress, the gardeners experienced a significantly greater decline in stress (as measured by salivary cortisol, a stress hormone), as well as a full restoration of positive mood; the readers actually experienced a further decline in mood.
I am not advocating gardening per se but just finding a way of doing something completely different as a means of winding down – and maybe cementing the lessons of the last year and looking forward to the next one.
May you all find ways to relax and sum up the lessons of the past year and take them forward into the New Year.
As Lyndon B. Johnson said Yesterday is not ours to recover, but tomorrow is ours to win or lose.
I built or rather extended a rockery in our garden. Not you would have thought very relaxing. It involved Googling how to design a rock garden then digging, moving topsoil, laying some small stones for drainage, building a path, rolling heavy rocks from across the garden (where they had got hidden in undergrowth) and then some planting. The finishing touch was a small antique white stone hippo brought for a very good price at the local garden centre.
A crazy way to wind down at first sight, but then I realised as I thought more about it that actually the activity and the result is both rewarding and therapeutic - a complete antidote to overworking and then over indulging in food and wine. Even my back and knee seem fine.
Rock gardens or alpine gardens date back to early Chinese and Japanese culture becoming very popular in Victorian times. See this Brief History which comments that The Chinese, especially, have a tradition of mountain worship and rockery in gardens to recreate mountain scenes and these can be seen as early as the late Yin and early Zhou dynasties (1600 BC- 771 BC). They create a space in a garden which can be both relaxing and calming - somewhere you can contemplate.
As I thought back over the year of 2018 and how to approach the new year which is just around the corner I realised that I had, perhaps accidentally, hit upon one of the things which is so important in our busy professional working lives – the ability to find ways to get away from everything for a time and put things into their proper perspective – even if it involves hard physical labour!
It seems gardening can reduce stress more than relaxing with a good book – see this article which says in an experiment subjects were asked to perform a stressful task and then asked to either perform 30 minutes of gardening in their allotment gardens or 30 minutes of reading. While both groups experienced a decrease in stress, the gardeners experienced a significantly greater decline in stress (as measured by salivary cortisol, a stress hormone), as well as a full restoration of positive mood; the readers actually experienced a further decline in mood.
I am not advocating gardening per se but just finding a way of doing something completely different as a means of winding down – and maybe cementing the lessons of the last year and looking forward to the next one.
May you all find ways to relax and sum up the lessons of the past year and take them forward into the New Year.
As Lyndon B. Johnson said Yesterday is not ours to recover, but tomorrow is ours to win or lose.
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