OBS Challenge: Getting More People Outdoors
February 6th, 2010 | 4 Comments
In mid January I issued a Challenge on the OBS blog. This is my answer to that challenge.
I suppose there are a lot of ways to get people to enjoy the outdoors. You can get them involved in a fun outdoor activity. You can take them on a trip that passes through many beautiful outdoor vistas. You can teach them a new skill that allows them to experience the outdoors in a new way. You can simply take someone by the hand and tell them to look up and count the stars. Getting people to enjoy the outdoors may involve a cool swimming hole on a hot afternoon or a chocolately, sticky s’more made over a campfire on a crisp autumn night. There are as many ways to get people to enjoy the outdoors as there are people.
There is, however, really only one way to ensure that people don’t enjoy the outdoors and that’s this: force them to be there.
Trust me on this one, I speak from personal experience.
When I was a kid I spent a lot of time outdoors. We rode bikes and built forts and skateboarded down the neighbors driveway and played elaborate games of pretend that centered around the trees in our yards or the park behind our neighborhood. By the time I became a teenager, however, my interest in the outdoors had waned a bit. I liked to read and write. I sang and did musical theater. Most of the stuff I enjoyed was indoor activity, and so I wasn’t getting as much exercise or as much outdoor time as I previously had done. I put on a few pounds and that worried my parents.
Now, I see they were trying to help. Then all I knew was that they were constantly dragging me outdoors to go for a walk or go for a bike ride. It probably wouldn’t have bugged me as much if there was some purpose to it, or if I had some say as to when or where we went, but that wasn’t the case. I was told I was being forced to be outdoors “for my own good” and, like a lot of things we are told are for our own good, I came to loathe being forced to do something I didn’t want to do.
The end result of all this was to foster a rather strong dislike of outdoor activity that persisted for several years. To me, the outdoors had become a place of obligation, not something I could voluntarily choose to experience and enjoy. Since it had become something I was forced to experience, I generally chose not to be outdoors when it was left to me to choose.
It was only when I was well into adulthood that I started coming to grips with the outdoors and discovering that I could find serenity and peace and even enjoyment from being outdoors and participating in outdoor activities. These days, now that I can choose, there are days I crave being outdoors and other days when I’m perfectly content to be inside. I’m also slowly trying new outdoor activities and knowing that I’m free to decide whether or not to continue with those outdoor activities makes all the difference.
If there is a moral to this story, and since I’m writing it I’ve decided there is, it would be this: everyone comes to the outdoors in their own way. If you have a child or a friend or a significant other that you’re trying to introduce to your favorite outdoor activity, make sure you give that person the freedom to choose their reaction. Understand that not everyone likes the same things, and be willing to accept that your way of enjoying the outdoors may not be another person’s way. There’s enough variety when it comes to outdoor activities that almost everyone could find something they enjoy. The trick is to allow everyone the freedom to make their own choices.
My Changing Outdoor Image
October 12th, 2009 | 11 Comments
I’ve been having a conflict of late, which is why this blog has been largely silent. (O.k., that’s one reason, the other was that I’ve been insanely busy, but since no one really wants to read a post about that, we’ll stick with I’ve been conflicted.) My conflict centers around the fact that, while other people may see me as an outdoor voice and an outdoorsperson, I don’t really see myself that way. I’ve always been a woman who likes her creature comforts. As my recent trip to Texas proves, I’m very much enamored of room service and plush hotels. I’m not much inclined to tramp around in the cold and the wet, or the hot and the humid for that matter. If I see a snake you’ll hear my scream three states away, and my sense of direction means any hike I take has a 50/50 chance of being a hunt for home. I’m probably the unlikeliest of people to be writing about the outdoors, let alone actually participating in outdoor activities.
I struggled with this fact for a while because I started feeling like a bit of a fraud. When I’m writing for the Outdoor Bloggers Summit I’m writing on behalf of the organization and I’m writing as a blogger. I have a lot of experience in being a writer, I’ve been writing one thing or another since I was six years old. I know how to write and I know how to give advice about writing and blogging and marketing. More to the point, I feel qualified to give advice and talk about writing. I feel like I’ve earned my spurs in that arena.
When it comes to the outdoors I’m not even sure I qualify for novice status. While there are things I want to try, there is also a lot of stuff about the outdoors (dirt, heat, snakes, animals that bite) that doesn’t appeal to me at all. There is also the fact that I support a lot of activities, say hunting for instance, and write about those activities, without ever having done them and without really being sure I will ever want to do them.
I think, sometimes, I feel a bit like Jody does, a trifle insecure about my status in this outdoor world that I’m just learning to know, a bit concerned that I might be trying to seem like something I’m not, and a little bit eager to see if I could be something more than what I think I am. If I’m being totally honest, there’s still a part of me that like the outdoors best when viewing it through a window. There is, however, also another part of me that wants to be out there, to test the limits of what I can do, or at least of what I want to do.
I’ve come to grips with the fact that I will never be the consummate outdoor woman. It’s taken a little longer to get comfortable with the idea that I don’t have to be. I guess I needed to hit myself over the head with one of the things that I so often say on the OBS blog, the outdoors is for everyone. There isn’t a prescribed way to enjoy it, and there isn’t a specified amount of time you must spend. Everyone goes about enjoying the outdoors in their own way, and that’s a good thing.
Challenge Post: Fighting Like Susan
August 19th, 2009 | 4 Comments
Stories of people who have triumphed over enormous odds have always fascinated me. I suppose, when you’ve faced some pretty steep odds yourself and come out the other side, you start to collect stories about others who have done the same. You study those stories, looking for tips and hints, maybe even looking for similarities, gaining hope and strength from the idea that what others have done, you can do too.
When I set the Fighting Like Susan Challenge before the OBS membership, I quoted one passage from the Fat Cyclist blog which I thought aptly summed up what this Challenge was about. The passage was this:
Susan’s part in the battle is over, but she didn’t lose. She led the charge. She showed the rest of us how to fight: with determination, focus, creativity, and outrageous endurance.
Now it’s up to the rest of us to Fight Like Susan.
Heroic people, inspirational people, often don’t know they’re heroic or inspirational. They’re just living their lives, doing the best they can and hoping to live the best life possible. That’s all Susan Nelson and her family were doing. That’s all Elden Nelson was doing when he started writing about Susan on his blog. I don’t think anyone knew what Susan would inspire or what the Fat Cyclist blog, and the readers of that blog would create. I’m willing to bet that the Nelson family would trade all of it to have their wife and mother healthy and whole and with them today.
When we think about fighting I’m guessing it’s the big battles most of us envision, but we need to remember that the big battles and the heroes everyone sings about aren’t the people who win the war. The people who win the wars are the people who are out in the trenches day after day, doing what needs to be done, taking their lumps as they come, and never, ever giving up. They don’t generally get a lot of recognition, and they don’t always win, but they keep fighting until there are no more fights left to be fought.
There are a lot of trenches still to be filled, and a lot of fights still to be fought. If you’re looking for ways to help in the fight against cancer, here are some places that can help you find ways to contribute:
Challenge Post: Not With a Mallet
August 18th, 2009 | 7 Comments
Just over a week ago, I issued a Challenge on the OBS blog. The subject of the Challenge was one I felt strongly about, and one that I knew had impacted a lot of outdoor bloggers including myself. I figure some of the OBS members will write some very personal stories and given that, I feel it is only fair that I share mine.
My mother and I didn’t always have the easiest relationship when I was growing up. We were, to use a British saying, as different as chalk and cheese. Everything she cared about meant nothing to me. Everything I revered she thought odd. We spent a lot of time talking at instead of to each other.
If there was one comfort during the troubled years of our relationship it was this, I knew we had tons of time. After all, the women on my mother’s side of the family lived forever. In fact, I used to joke that you had to hit them over the head with a mallet to take them out. I had great aunts who lived into their late nineties. My maternal grandmother lived to be 98. I had no reason to expect or believe that my mother wouldn’t do exactly the same thing.
Until I did have reason.
Mom was diagnosed with liver cancer in the late 90’s. By the time they found it the cancer was very advanced. Liver cancer is also one of the hardest cancers to treat and has a very high fatality rate. The doctor who diagnosed Mom gave her six months to live. I’m guessing, privately, he thought she had less.
The cancer fought hard, but Mom fought harder and bought herself three more years. If it can ever be said that good can come out of something horrible, then those three years were an awful lot of good. Since I knew our time was limited, and that perhaps I wouldn’t have the luxury of years to make amends, I said what needed to be said, apologized when apologies were due, and got to know my mother in a way I never had before. It wasn’t all roses and sunshine, in fact a lot of it sucked monumentally, but I finally made peace with Mom and with myself.
Mom died in 2002. It wasn’t a gentle death or an easy one. The cancer robbed her of her speech and her coordination and finally her life. The jokes I’d made about having to take the women in my family out with a mallet suddenly didn’t seem so funny. At that time, pretty much nothing seemed funny.
My mother, Glenda Ackerman Shreve Fosgitt was 56 when she died.
We should have had more time, but cancer came along and suddenly everything was different.
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