Rules for Visiting

by Jessica Francis Kane

Thus I visited each of my friends in turn, trying, with fumbling fingers, to prise open their locked caskets. I went from one to the other holding my sorrow—no, not my sorrow but the incomprehensible nature of this our life—for their inspection. Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends

“Did you know people will underestimate the weight of a heavy backpack before climbing a steep hill if they’re standing next to a friend?”

It was finally published in 1755, and until the completion of The Oxford English Dictionary 173 years later, it was the preeminent dictionary in English and still ranks as one of the greatest achievements of scholarship ever produced by one person.

The Japanese have a word for the calming, restorative power of simply being in a forest or among trees: shinrin-yoku, forest bathing.