Letters: Put the phone down and enjoy the beauty around you

Regarding “Island Reboot,” by An Amlotte, Nov. 22: Most of us cannot afford to travel to far distant places to experience beauty and lazy days. My wishes would be to echo this trip, but it’s not in my near future. However, I can still put my phone down and experience lots of beauty around me.

I work to focus on my surroundings, whether it’s in my yard gazing at the flowers, the butterflies or the praying mantis following my voice as I converse with it.

It’s all good because I am not distracted by a small device held in my hand, but looking around at the life that surrounds me.

I am on the bus and looking out the windows and also at my companions on that same bus. What are many doing? Gazing at the small devices in their hands and missing so much of life.

I witness the clouds scudding across the sky, or in the evening, the beautiful colors changing shape rapidly as the sun goes down.

Or my 2-year-old grandson, Calvin, hugging a tree in Eaton Canyon. That photo became the family Christmas card that year.

More experiences than a heart can hold, and it does not take a remote and expensive trek — just paying attention.

Beverly Franco

Monterey Park

Medical advice

Regarding “7 Tips on Trip Insurance,” by Catharine Hamm, Nov. 22: One important tip that was not emphasized in the On the Spot column is going to a clinic instead of to a hospital for any non-life-threatening injury. The cost difference is astounding.

I went to a clinic in Paris and was more than a little impressed with the professionalism and care I was accorded.

Clinics are especially valuable in the U.S., where going to a hospital emergency room will cost upward of $1,000. Recently, a young Swedish girl visiting San Francisco was bitten by an unknown insect. Her foot became very swollen and her friends panicked and rushed her to a hospital emergency room.

She waited there for hours until a doctor told her to go to a pharmacy and buy an over-the-counter product. This advice cost the girl’s parents more than $2,000. Had she gone to a clinic, the cost would have been closer to $100.

B. Soderstrom

Irvine