Why am I writing a blog about hiking?

I’ve always really enjoyed hiking as a great way to get outside and enjoy nature. It’s good exercise, it’s centering for your mind, decreases your stress and increases your overall mental and physical health. Lately I’ve been getting out less. There are a bunch of reasons, kids are getting older so it’s harder to drag them out. Keeping them active was always a good excuse to get outside. I haven’t been in great shape so the trek is less enjoyable when you’re sucking wind. There was a big list of projects around the house when we moved, and they were fairly urgent. That list felt way more important than getting out and either exercising or wandering in the woods. It’s easy to tell yourself that working around the house is plenty of exercise. The truth is, I really want to be out in nature and I’ve gotten away from it.

I work at the kind of place where people have 20, 30, even 40+ year careers. It’s extremely uncommon in this day and age. One morbid side effect of that is we get obituaries sent around pretty often, because the current employees might have worked with one of these deceased retirees for a good long while. The story is so strikingly similar that it makes me really uncomfortable. 30 year career, retired at 65 passed on at 70. Usually when I hear about someone passing at 70 I think to myself: “Well, they had a decent run. Life didn’t really owe them anything.” Then my mom passed last year. At 70. She lived longer than is typical for my family tree. Minimum retirement age for my age group is 67. That leaves me three years. I don’t have any right to expect any more than 3 years to enjoy being retired. and that’s if I’m healthy enough and with it mentally enough to actually enjoy it.

That hit me pretty hard. I started telling myself I’d better get to living. I really should enjoy it while it lasts.

There are literally thousands of hikes to do within an hour’s drive of anyone’s house. It’s easy to get lazy or complacent and stay inside when the conditions aren’t perfect, and I’ve been guilty of that lately. This blog is meant to give me a way to have some accountability for getting out and a little record of where I’ve gone and what I’ve done. I’ve already done hundreds of hikes, and I wish I had started something like this earlier. Until recently I had posted most stuff like this to social media. I’m fed up with social media. After having my account restricted several times lately for no good reason, I realized that I didn’t have ownership over my own creative content, and that these companies were reaping huge profits on the fact that we are all sharing our lives on their websites. Uncool. A long post like this or an album of 10-20 pictures on social media is pretty cringeworthy anyway. If people want to see what I’m up to, they can come check it out. I don’t want to invade everyone’s feed like a Wordle score or Farmville request.

If you like my stuff go ahead and leave a comment. If there’s something people really want to see I’ll definitely consider doing it. I’ll check out a specific hike, I’ll jump in a swamp, or eat a bug, or whatever. I’m not proud and I’ll do anything for a laugh. I’m also considering the very real possibility that this is just for my own personal amusement, and that’s OK too.

First of many posts. Get to living.