I don’t know about you but with the weather warming up and the days growing longer, my mind has been turning to the summer months ahead.
This will be my third summer since beginning Must Hike Must Eat and it will be no different as I start to begin my outdoor plans in earnest and things here on the blog will hit “summer mode”. I have written 3-5 posts each week since last September (105 to be exact) and now it’s time once again to focus on the “being” more than the “sharing”. Life is all about balance.
You may be thinking this is a bit premature, but hear me out. Usually this slow down kicks off with Memorial Day Weekend and camping down at the river with friends but I find myself in the middle of May just a few months into being married and realizing that now is as good a time as any. In fact, last week I woke up on Saturday morning and made the decision to not write one word here on the blog for a week. After so much time with nothing but a thin sliver of margin in my life, it literally felt like exhaling a breath I had held for too long. I even did yardwork…and hiked.
Most of you know that a lot of great things have been happening in my life over the last few months but for some reason I was not feeling as good as I would have like. I felt off. Tired, restless, spacey, etc. My attention span was worse than a 3 year old. How could this be? Then I remembered a study by Holmes and Rahe called the Life Stress Inventory. Turns out our bodies don’t are whether we have good stress or bad stress, it has all the same effect. I took the assessment and both my new husband and I scored over 300 which indicates a 80% propensity to a stress-induced illness. Yikes!
Summer will afford me some time to reset my priorities moving forward. I am making a list of all the things that are important to me and being present is on top. Following my heart is, too, and the last few months have shown me that I haven’t been doing that as well as I would like. Not to say that I haven’t been spending my time on things that bring me joy, but trying to do all of them at the same time in the way I have grown accustomed (pre-marriage) has meant that some of those things have not been done as well as I would like. It even felt sometimes that I was choosing writing over actually getting out and hiking. And that would be missing the whole point.
Not hiking as much, nor eating and sleeping as well as I would like has only contributed to my lack of physical health. I’m feeling more achy and arthritic than I would like and the same symptoms I had the last time I was diagnosed with anemia have returned (mainly shortness of breath). Stress and craziness will do that to you. So, I have taken stock of the whys and the hows and begun to make plans for rearranging life and weaving out what isn’t as important. I need to periodically do this refresh to keep my sanity. It isn’t something you can do once and you are set. Sometime later it starts to unravel at the ends as life does its thing, priorities change or you just need a reminder. Don’t misunderstand, hiking and writing are what I want to be doing and have a lot of support for. But they aren’t the only things and sometimes the whole messy jumble needs to be readjusted.
Posts will be coming out in the next 3 months but as they happen and not by trying to stick to a schedule. I’ll still be writing up trip reports and if you read my Friday Faves 5/11/2018, you know that series will return in the fall and for now Twitter is probably the best place to find the articles and other tidbits I will find myself reading this summer. I’ll be finding myself more often in places without reception so things will come slower to the internet but I’ll be sharing on social media when I can.
And maybe the same will be for you. My readers tend to be on-the-go people and so spending time online reading someone else’s stories comes second to going out and making their own. If you are not sure that describes you, than make this the summer that it does. Whatever that looks like for you…
I look forward to coming back to you refreshed and ready to share more of my outdoor adventures, healthy recipes, DIY tips and life ponderings in a more purposeful and intentional manner in the fall. I’ll be sharing with you about how I lead an all women trail crew out on my adopted section of the Pacific Crest Trail, headed up to Canada and helped replace the Northern Terminus marker of the Pacific Crest Trail, ventured over to Glacier National Park to do some backpacking, visited (twice maybe even) my “happy place” in the North Cascades, and God willing successfully make my traverse of the Olympics on the Pacific Northwest Trail (that has been thwarted the last 3 years).
And, hopefully, there will be a few recounts of how I took some brave steps to bring more of my own dreams and passions to the forefront and in line with the direction I feel I am being led to take. And I pray the same for you.
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