Freelance 101: Going Green

Being stuck behind my monitors, I can often forget that there is a whole big, green, nice world out there. Leaves and grass and bugs and all that kind of stuff. I live in a beautiful part of the USA, and spring has sprung.

And that started me thinking about going green.

No – I don’t mean recycling my email printouts and cycling down the monitors to a lower brightness (although I do a little bit of that anyway.) I mean going green OUTSIDE. I know – scary thought for some of us…

So: Get outside. Get some fresh air. Open the windows and let the sun shine in.

Going green is good for the soul, and it’s a good way to kind of press the reset button in your brain. If you sit too long in one place, you have a tendency to get into this kind of circular thinking – doing the same thing over and over. You have a tendency to kind of melt into your chair and get loopy. Work can suffer – and your demeanor along with it.

If you get out, you can make friends with the animals and bugs, talk to the trees, see designs in the ants attacking a popsicle stick. Even if you don’t get a tremendous amount of inspiration in walking in nature, you will benefit by getting a little sun on your cheeks and some non-CPU-fan-pushed air in your lungs.

Do this: Take three five minute trips outside today. Breathe in deep, squint at the sun, listen to the quiet of nature (actually, the din of nature) and press reset in your mind. Your work will be better for it…

(All this said by a guy sitting in a darkened office, pecking away at a blog. That’s it. I’m going to go look at our strawberry plants…)