Tenderfoot Diaries

I should be going to sleep, but I’m not doing that, I’m writing instead.  The reason I’m writing is something I read on another outdoor blog which, for some reason, is just sticking with me.  The blog in question is Whitetail Woods, written by a good blogging friend, Rick Kratzke.  Rick just celebrated the first anniversary of his current blog, and in his “Tuesday Tips and Techniques” segment this week, he shared some advice about blogging.  His main bit of advice?  Blog from the heart.

I have to confess that I”ve always relied more on my head than my heart.  I’m a cerebral kind of woman, and I tend to follow my brain.  Following your heart is more unreliable, and more likely to get you hurt or into trouble.  Despite knowing and truly believing that, I’m starting to discover that my entire foray into the outdoors has been one big exercise in following my heart and refusing to listen to what my brain was telling me.  Strangely enough that may have been a good thing.

All my life I’ve been the quintessential indoor girl.  Outdoors was too hot or too cold and there were bugs or snakes.  The humidity made my hair curl.  The sun burned my skin or made me freckle.  The wind ruffled the pages of my books and made them hard to read.  I did spend quite a bit of time outside when I was a kid, but I wasn’t always happy about it.  Mostly I preferred climate control, a soft place to sit and room service.   I was not anyone’s idea of an outdoor girl.

Then, because I needed a job, I took one with an outdoor company, despite knowing next to nothing about the outdoors.  I built a following for that company, and started writing a blog about outdoor activities and issues, without any qualification at all other than I worked for an outdoor company and I could write.   I started interacting with other outdoor bloggers most of whom were talking about and doing things that were completely foreign to me.  I often felt like they all spoke a secret language that I just couldn’t learn, but something made me want to keep trying to learn, and so I did.

Eventually, my outdoor contacts and some of the things I’d said on the corporate blog led to the formation of the Outdoor Bloggers Summit. As that organization grew, I became very passionate about giving a louder voice to those who talk about the outdoors and about encouraging more outdoor voices to speak.  I put my time and effort and my own money into making that happen.   To this day,  I still wonder what fuels that passion, and why making sure that the outdoor voices are heard has come to matter so much to me, but even if I’m not always sure why, I know it’s something I was meant to do.   My brain may wonder, but the rest of me knows that part of my heart lies there.

If someone had told me 3 1/2 years ago that I’d be doing any of the outdoor things I do now, I would have laughed myself sick.  This was not where my life was meant to go, and these things are not the things my rational brain had decreed that I would be doing.   Still, even though I feel sometimes like I’m living the life of someone other than myself, I wouldn’t trade the experiences I’ve had, or the ones I’m going to have, for anything.   I may never be the quintessential outdoor girl, and I’m not sure I even want to be, but I will be something different than I thought I would be 3 1/2 years ago, and it’s all due to one thing.

Instead of listening to my brain, I followed my heart.

I can’t wait to see where it leads me next.