Daily Herald Opinion: Nature will help you find real balance

This editorial represents the consensus opinion of the Daily Herald Editorial Board

These days, so many of us are searching for a work-life balance. It's an important goal to maintain - or get back to - a place of happiness or at least peace.

For many former office workers, the COVID-19 pandemic has inched us closer to such a balance. But work-life balance isn't just sitting in your house all day, clacking away and Zooming with co-workers and clients. Such a newfound lifestyle affords us the luxury of a 10-second commute and comfy clothing, but it's not enough to achieve a real balance.

We have books, music, art and religion to help us get there. But let's not forget the restorative power of nature.

Writer Henry David Thoreau famously said he learned everything he needed to in life from walking in the woods and communing with nature. He wrote:

"I love nature partly because she is not man, but a retreat from him. None of his institutions control or pervade her. There a different kind of right prevails. In her midst I can be glad with an entire gladness. If this world were all man, I could not stretch myself, I should lose all hope. He is constraint, she is freedom to me. He makes me wish for another world. She makes me content with this."

We are fortunate as suburbanites to have so many opportunities to escape - if temporarily - our jobs, our troubles and our moods by taking a walk in the woods.

Of course, there are forest preserves and conservation districts with expansive land holdings all over the suburbs. But we are also lucky to be in proximity to the Morton Arboretum in Lisle, Cantigny Park in Wheaton and the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe, among others.

Each is worth the drive.

The arboretum is an example of when nature meets art.

Today, to mark the 100th anniversary of the 1,700-acre arboretum, its new $16.6 million Grand Garden, which stretches the length of two football fields, will be opened to the public.

It's meant to serve as a calming transition from the bustle around the visitors center to the more natural terrain of the arboretum, our Katlyn Smith wrote.

Everything the designers and gardeners at these three jewels of the suburbs do is geared toward reminding us what nature's beauty has to offer us - beauty, an intentional break from technology, a concentrated boost of oxygen.

According to the National Park Service, spending 20 minutes in nature improves concentration and reduces the need for ADHD and ADD medications in children. Exercising in nature leads to greater benefits than doing the same activity indoors. And a 30-minute visit to a park can improve heart health and circulation and lower cholesterol, blood glucose and blood pressure.

Do yourself a favor. Back away from your computer, shut off the TV and visit nature's bounty to get away from it all. You won't be sorry.

As Thoreau wrote, "We can never have enough of nature."