I am writing this with Election Day at hand and what feels like uncertainty and change in the air. Preparing for Christmas has been on my mind, we have our Thanksgiving plans set, it feels like a time to evaluate where I am on current goals and to start pondering on new ones. With this all in mind, I thought I would talk about a goal we had last year and how that turned out.
December 2018 my husband and I decided on a goal for 2019, a goal of one hundred fifty hikes to be completed that year. There weren’t many rules to this goal, just to be a hike it had to be on a trail in a natural area. City walks would not count unless it was in one of our forested parks that have miles of hiking trails. You see hiking had become a habit of ours already and I had been keeping track of them all in my planner. I generally write down most things I do in my planner to keep track of my days- small business artist and all- then felt compelled to tally them up. We had done eighty seven hikes in 2018! So in talking about the popular fifty two hike challenge where people hike once a week for a year, we decided we would make up our own challenge. Fifty two wasn’t much of a chore for us with our hitting eighty seven on accident, so we thought something nearly double would be good, and rounded down to one hundred fifty. We had thought we would be just short of three a week so we would have some breaks built in, but underestimated how much of a time investment it truly was! We hiked and hiked and only finished our goal on December 31st with Cory hitting one fifty and me finishing with one fifty seven. I am thinking about this goal as I wrote down yesterday’s hike, number seventy six for the year on November 1st.. So far behind where we were last year and yet I knew maintaining that frequency wasn’t manageable as we had so little free time outside of hiking! Still, at some point I decided one hundred hikes was a reasonable yearly goal and being so close I hope to hit it.
This year has been frustratingly hard for any goal- hiking or business, but still I have hope. For difficulties keeping me from hiking I had my wisdom teeth out in February. It is such a routine procedure for teens and early twenty somethings but being thirty two it was made more difficult. My doctor warned me not to hike too soon and when I tried after a couple of weeks I had to stop as my mouth was throbbing so bad. I didn’t get a hike in until three weeks after! Then came COVID closures where state parks, many city parks and all the national forest trailheads in the forests near us were closed and that continued for a couple of months. We ended up hiking a couple of county parks we discovered, some national forest ones by not parking at trailheads and then Forest Park as thankfully we could go there still. Even still with all that has reopened so many trail heads have limited their parking or some have not reopened at all. I never would have expected the outdoors to be taken away, it’s the best way to keep healthy I believe. Thinking on art goals I hoped to be in stores this year and so many have closed or are on hard times. I normally do some art booths and all of those have been cancelled. I have changed my focus to more online selling as a result which is far from natural for me haha!
Even with this time of hardship I feel compelled to give thanks and to keep setting goals. My husband and I have had so much more time together this year as he has worked from home, I won the People’s Choice Award for a painting I worked very hard on, I had my largest online sale, my husband took up woodwork and has made marvelous frames and collaborated with me on some art which had been a goal for some time!
I am not set on what goals I have for next year though I believe one hundred hikes will be a part of it. Perhaps I will finally put together my book of western landscapes, illustrate all the mushrooms I have seen and do more collaborations with my husband. I think making our collaborations a more permanent fixture and offering them for online sales will be a goal.
I can’t say what 2021 will bring, but I can say I encourage you to keep setting goals and working towards something. It may sound cliche, but I know for me the goals I have worked toward have become more of a habit and I am happier where I am now because of them.
Some of 2019’s hikes:
