Go.Do.Now.

Trash Talk

Slip on your trainers, grab a trash picker, and walk your neighborhood while corralling garbage with a friend. Even the tidiest looking streets shelter little warrens of rubbish: bottle caps, gum wrappers, and often worse. It’s a pleasure to stroll your home turf on a minor mission, doing a simple mitzvah for the benefit of all. And it’s strangely satisfying to fill a bag with refuse that was previously free-ranging, knowing that the world is a slightly better place because you are in it.

Strolling your neighborhood to pick up loose trash, anytime at all, free.

Altered States

A New Year demands a new-and-improved you, or at least a you who’s striving towards some kind of transformation. If you haven’t tried float therapy yet, give it a go, and get in touch with that kernel of resolve that resides deeply within. It’s definitely there or we would have quit trying already, in a world where the bad news lately outpaces the good. A warm tank of salty water absent all sound and light forces you back to your primordial mind. There’s no guilt or regret, no shame living there; it’s a blank slate for new possibilities and fresh hope.

True Rest Float Spa, 3270 California Blvd. C, Napa, 254-9445, truerest.com, $65 and up

C’mon, Get Happy

All too soon the twinkling lights on the Plaza will be boxed up, put away until the holiday season comes around again next year. Before they go, be reminded of their magic by way of a short video from Sonoma Arts Live, who tapped a couple of well-known local belters for a stirring duet under the Plaza’s curtain of lights. If you don’t feel something while listening, your heart may be stone. And if you do? Feel a swell of gooseflesh and and a rising tide of other feeling? Well, that’s just joy, right on time for 2021.

Sonoma Arts Live’s virtual reminder that “Happy Days are Here Again” (or will be soon enough) at vimeo.com/487685447/83303a09d4, free.

Westward, Ho!

Is there a better place to spend New Year’s Day than at the edge of a continent, looking west? Something about the limitless of the view triggers corresponding thoughts of personal possibility. What new opportunities will you embrace in 2021? What kinds of goals will you determine to reach? Perhaps the book you’ve been threatening to write will now find its way out, or you’ll trade comfort and ease for some kind of new challenge. Decide to move forward with a wide open heart, but throw in some backbone to make sure you get there.

Any Sonoma Coast beach, free.

—Kate Williams