This time, like most times and as per custom with many people who call “home” two or more countries, Christmas and New Years found me on the road. This reminds me of that old (Romanian) saying “Calatorului ii sta bine cu drumul” (The traveller is suited to the road) which my grandma used to say while putting her hat on and getting ready to go home after seeing her grandchildren – my brother and I. For me, the saying pops to mind every time I start packing my suitcase.
This particular trip had multiple destinations and included various means of transport. I flew to Romania for Christmas, then I flew to Germany for NY and then headed back to the UK by car and boat. One thing the whole trip had in common was the book that kept me company throughout – The Doorstep Mile by Al Humphreys. This book is an invitation to living more adventurously and, while I personally found my life to be quite adventurous and therefore needs very little spicing up, it led me to the same conclusion Lost Connections led me last year – it reminded me I love being out in nature and I really, really miss that.
Why am I telling you this?
I’ve been urging everybody, and you, to set goals for the next 3-40-50 years, for this decade and for this year. Most people set goals around work, maybe around money and possessions, a lot of people set goals around health and fitness and some folk, like me, set goals around travel as well.
For some people it’s easier to set goals for shorter term, for others for longer term, but we rarely pause to think why we set them. Sure, not all folk. If you’ve been setting goals for the next 30-40 years, you already know why… But if you’ve set goals for the short and medium-ish terms only, the WHY might not be there or might not be so compelling.
The why, the big WHY, always has something to do with happiness, with the quality of life, with a vision we have for our lives. And you instinctively know this, we want financial freedom, we want a certain kind of lifestyle because that’s what happiness looks like and we think that once we have that, we can do everything else – aka smaller things we could in fact do now, today, this week or this month, and yet we don’t. But the want (and maybe the need) is NOW, not in 30 years time when we think we’ll have laid our ducks in order (does this ever even happen?). The want might also have to do with how we envision the experience – it’s not the same going camping in your 20s with going camping in your 60s.
And with the realisations I’ve had, my wish to spend more time in nature, I decided to honour this want now. That’s why I’ve declared 2020 the year of doing more of the things I love and I’ve chosen some small adventures to enable me to track my progress. These are activities I can do in a few hours to a weekend away and are all supported by the SMARTER goals I’ve set in all areas of my life.
Doing more of what I love:
- ?️ Visit 5 new UK cities
- ? Visit 7 English Heritage sites
- ?♀️ Go to 10 Park Runs I haven’t been before
- ??♀️ Go on 3 hikes longer than 10k
- ?️ 10k exploration run in a new country
I’m curious, what goals related to adventure or leisure, or both, have you set? And if you haven’t set any yet, and there are things related to enjoyment, adventure and leisure you’d like to do, what are those – can you set some goals now? Or shall we do this together?
