Weekly newsletter
I. Prompts for motivation
When was the last time you spent an entire day or weekend mostly outdoors? What changes to your lifestyle would help you get more outdoor time throughout your week?
How often do you pause to step away from your devices and go outside for a walk or a few minutes of fresh air? Can you notice a difference in your system and overall well-being when you push yourself to embrace daily exposure to nature?
II. Thoughts for intention
It’s no secret that outdoor time helps reduce stress and enhance our physical and mental health. The science behind the activity shows that it significantly boosts our mood and improves our cognitive abilities in creativity and problem-solving. Moreover, getting our regular dose also provides us with more Vitamin D, immune system support, and better sleep quality.
Enjoying the outdoors is more than just a pastime; it’s essential to our everyday lives. We need regular movement to stay active and keep our energy levels up, which helps us handle daily challenges, avoid fatigue, and stay productive. As simple as it sounds, just a few minutes can make a difference like night and day when it comes to our sense of focus, alertness, and state of mind.
III. Ideas for preparation
One way to get more outdoor time is by making adjustments to your daily routine. By integrating nature into regular activities like walking, biking, meetings, and more, it won’t be long before you’ve fully adapted these routines into a balanced lifestyle. You can even double down on this approach by habit stacking, which can involve designing certain items on your to-do list one after another or pairing them as a joint activity. This may include listening to music or a podcast while gardening, hiking, running, and more.
Another way to enjoy the outdoors is to take up new hobbies. From skiing to fishing to watersports to camping and more, the range of possibilities is endless. Find your community and meet with local groups that share the same interests as you. As long as you prioritize this as a non-negotiable component of your life and schedule in the time on a regular basis, the effort you put in will go a long way.
IV. Quotes for inspiration
“None of your knowledge, your reading, your connections will be of any use here: two legs suffice, and big eyes to see with. Walk alone, across mountains or through forests. You are nobody to the hills or the thick boughs heavy with greenery. You are no longer a role, or a status, not even an individual, but a body, a body that feels sharp stones on the paths, the caress of long grass and the freshness of the wind. When you walk, the world has neither present nor future: nothing but the cycle of mornings and evenings. Always the same thing to do all day: walk. But the walker who marvels while walking (the blue of the rocks in a July evening light, the silvery green of olive leaves at noon, the violet morning hills) has no past, no plans, no experience. He has within him the eternal child. While walking I am but a simple gaze.”
― Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking
“Summer on the high plateau can be delectable as honey; it can also be a roaring scourge. To those who love the place, both are good, since both are part of its essential nature. And it is to know its essential nature that I am seeking here. To know, that is, with the knowledge that is a process of living. This is not done easily nor in an hour. It is a tale too slow for the impatience of our age, not of immediate enough import for its desperate problems. Yet it has its own rare value. It is, for one thing, a corrective of glib assessment: one never quite knows the mountain, nor oneself in relation to it. However often I walk on them, these hills hold astonishment for me. There is no getting accustomed to them.”
― Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain
