Hey! Got A Minute? Let’s talk about the outdoors a bit. I’ve always loved the outdoors but I lost touch with it. See, my early formative years were spent in a town of about 100 people, on a lake, in the woods in southern Ontario. My friends and I were CONSTANTLY outside: riding bikes, fishing, tramping through the woods and camping. I LOVED camping. I lost touch with this feeling when I moved to Toronto as a young ‘adult’. I didn’t have the time or money to get home as much as I wanted, didn’t own a car so I couldn’t drive anywhere…and my outdoor experience was more about sitting on a patio on Queen St. than sitting around a campfire in the woods. In fact, it took a number of years of living in Thunder Bay before I realized how much I missed being outside. Now, any time I can get outside, I’m there. I prefer a walk in the woods to a walk around the block, but I’ll take what I can get most days. My kids though? Not so much.
Don’t get me wrong, the kids LOVE it when they are outside but I have to force them to go places. They want to watch TV or play Lego or video games, read or listen to music (sometimes all at the same time), pretty much anything that will keep them inside. Their mom doesn’t like to camp any more and Gramma hasn’t been camping in quite a while so she hasn’t taken them either. I have been camping a few times over the years but trying to convince the kids to come has been a battle I wasn’t going to win so I didn’t fight too hard. Lately though, it’s been a little easier to get the kids outside. They see that I’m spending more time outside, they’ve seen the pictures I’ve taken on my hikes and asked me a million questions about how the Current River is flowing, etc. Now that the weather has been a little better, they seem very keen on getting out hiking with me.
The last time we went anywhere for an extended period of time, it was The Cascades. There was still ice on the river and I have some fantastic shots of the little dorks climbing over everything. Not only was it a lot of fun to be outside in nature, the good moods they were in continued into the next day….oh yeah, and they slept REALLY well that night too! Covid, online learning and winter was not good for the kids. They’ve been moody, emotional and lazier than usual. I’ve done my best to get them social interaction but interacting indoors just isn’t the same as having the chance to get outside, run, use their imagination and be silly. In fact, if I hadn’t had a friend ask me to go on a couple of night-time hikes with her this winter, I’m sure I would have been much more irritable than I was…so I don’t blame the kids at all.
As adults, we talk about how we were always outside and our folks never worried about us when we were kids. It was a LOT easier for our parents to get us outside because we didn’t have what our kids have inside. There wasn’t an internet, no computers, no smart phones…so we had to use our imaginations, we had to find things to do outside. As an adult, I lost that feeling of being outside, of the fresh air and freedom that my imagination could bring. Unfortunately, my kids picked up on that and haven’t really experienced the joy that the outdoors gave me to the extent that I did. So I’m going try and change that this weekend and get them out every day. I don’t know if they’ll ever embrace the outdoors the way I did as a kid, but there are so many wonderful things to show them, slowly, in our area that I need to try.
Winter and Covid-19 have kept the majority of us, including many outdoor enthusiasts, indoors too much. On top of the pandemic, mental health issues have spiked across the province, and one of the quickest, easiest (particularly here) ways to calm some of those issues is to get outside. It’s going to be nice this weekend, so if you can, put down your phone, put aside your work, the laundry will wait, get outside. Get some sun, go for a walk in the woods if you can, around the block if that’s all you can do. Get the kids outside, even if they’re on their phones sitting on the front porch, it just might spark some spontaneous play. Outdoors is not a cure-all by any means, but I’m sure you’ll feel a heck of a lot better (you might not even realize you weren’t feeling particularly well until after you come back in!) if you give yourself some time outside.
Don’t just do it this weekend though, try to get outside as much as possible as often as possible.
