When I was a youngster, my childhood friends and I would often bicycle to Lake Erie to watch its waves wash ashore to the Cleveland rocks and sand. Although we did not fully realize it at the time, the water provided a therapy for us. Therapy was not what we were looking for, but it is what we received as we sat at the edge of the great lake and looked into its depths.
Water has a way of soothing people. Years later, we would learn that from college psychology courses or from doctors who appeared on television talk shows. I guess my childhood friends and I had figured it out while we rode our bicycles from our Cleveland neighborhood to Lake Erie.
It is not just water of Lake Erie that can be soothing, but many small streams will do the same. Doctors have long known this. Maybe that's why some medical offices have small table-sized waterfalls or aquariums in the waiting rooms.
The accompanying story is a television report on the subject. There are no doctors or "experts" in my report. But there are everyday people I found at the water's edge of Lake Erie and on the banks of a small tricking stream winding its way through a Cleveland wooded area. They will tell you how water has its effect on them.
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