Sometimes just setting goals turns out to be writing down hopes and dreams.
Sometimes it starts a process.
For me, it is most often a mix of the two. Sometimes it is what I think I want to realize in my life. Sometimes it merely starts me on a path that can turn out quite differently than I think, even when it looks from the outside very much like the dream.
I wrote out some goals for this year last month, and some are already taking a step toward finding a reality in my life. This is the record of that process.
Regarding the photography interest. I signed up for a photography course online, actually two courses. And, I have watched the course intro and started watching the first lesson. Those few minutes have taken me a couple of weeks, but what they have inspired is me picking up my camera and trying out various pictures.
And, I had restarted this blog with the idea that I would post my own pics to each writing.
What I have come to realize is that I have a lot of pictures that I have taken over the past 5 years (time I have been trying out the camera at intervals). Many are not good. Some are OK and a few ~ well, I like a few. So one of the tasks that I will need to handle is to delete all those bad ones, set aside the ones that are OK for learning how to edit them, and reserving the ones I really like.
First, that would clear up my picture gallery to something I can use for this blog site. Second it would give me material to work with for my course. And third, it would clean up my data on my computer and drive.
I had decided to work on the photography course 3x/wk for an hour. That will not work for me. I am retired. Some days I am interested in sitting at the computer and learning and working. And, others, not so much.
Another interest that I came up with was hiking to take the place of exercise, which I do not do. I joined a group called 52 Hike. The idea is to hike at least a mile once a week. So far I have done 3 hikes.
My first one was mid-January, so I was already behind on the weekly idea. I decided to go to a local preserve and hike a loop of about a mile. I had never explored this preserve before. I downloaded an app called AllTrails, but the trail was not listed in it. I decided to wing it. I parked and started hiking. An hour later, I bushwacked my way to some houses…and found that I was quite a distance from where I had entered the trail. I had walked across the preserve instead of in a loop. (Poorly marked trail intersecting with multiple trails.)
Getting lost made me hesitant to try again. However, I posted on the group site and got lots of encouraging remarks that others had also gotten lost on a hike before. And, I did have pictures to post.
I tried another hike a couple of weeks or so later. This time I called it exploring rather than hiking. I went to a local bird sanctuary. Again I took about an hour but this time I was wandering and taking pics and couldn’t get lost as it was walking around a series of foraging ponds. More pics.
The third hike was this week. I went to a local woods. Multiple trails intersecting. A little lost but Alltrails had the map and so I was able to stay relatively on the trail with a little backtracking. A 2.1 mile hike was 2.7 miles for me. Again about an hour. Very few pics.
Each time I have gone, I have learned something new. I now have a day pack, hiking poles, and a first aid kit. (I already had the hiking boots.) I have learned that even a short hike requires water and other gear.
Finally, I have started planning my vegetable garden. I am not sure how much I will be away from home this year, but I want to do better with growing food than I did last year. Today I got the seeds and plants ordered. This month, I will get the garden soil and manure and begin prepping the beds. And will decide on and prep some planters for some of the plants.
This isn’t everything that I had chosen to set goals for. It is the start. And, at least the hiking and photography are working into a combination.
With each of these, though, I am learning new and different things, and I am finding that small decisions/actions lead to other paths. Some imagined. Some surprising.
Feathers of My Mind 