I’ve been thinking a lot lately about choices. Today I woke up, puttered around the kitchen for a while, read a book, started to take a nap, and finally forced myself to get out of bed and leave the house. We’ve had snow here in Nashville which has been a bit of a phenomenon because it’s actually hung around. Most of the time when it snows here, the totals barely reach an inch and within a few hours become a distant memory as we slog through mud for a few days. I haven’t been able to get into the woods over the past few weekends because of bad weather and things we had going on, but today I was determined to see the trees covered in snow.
As I left the house and crunched along the ice on our road, I kept thinking about turning around, but the main roads were clear. When I pulled into the park, I couldn’t contain my excitement. I didn’t fix or filter any of these pictures, this is just how it was. And the whole time I was walking and trudging up the trail I kept thinking, “I could have missed this. I could have stayed inside and missed this.”
Edwin Warner Park
“I would have missed this…” It got me thinking. How much do I miss as a result of certain choices? It’s always easier to stay home, snuggle up with a cat and a book, drink some tea, and bliss out on a good story. It’s easier than making the effort to pick up the phone or make time in the calendar to connect with friends. Easier than getting bundled up and walking to town for exercise when it’s cold out. Easier than planning a trip and going to the airport and flying somewhere. It’s always easier to stay home. But is it always worth it?
I’m married to a man who is slowly introducing balance into my life because we are opposites in just about every way. Where I feel the need to GO GO GO in order to feel productive and be inspired, he feels the need to rest and relax as a result of the physically exhausting nature of his job. So on days where I’m dying to get out, he is often aching to put his feet up and chill. We are learning to respect our individual needs and compromise whenever we can. So sometimes the choice to stay home is a necessary one.
But if there’s one thing I would encourage everyone in my life to do, it would be to get outside more and experience this beautiful world that we live in.
Radnor Lake
philosophies of any particular era or even with getting from point A to
point B. It had to do with how it felt to be in the wild. With
what it was like to walk for miles with no reason other than to witness
the accumulation of trees and meadows, mountains and deserts, streams
and rocks, rivers and grasses, sunrises and sunsets. The experience was
powerful and fundamental. It seemed to me that it had always felt like
this to be a human in the wild, and as long as the wild existed it would
always feel this way.”