We’ve set a goal to spend at least five hundred hours outdoors during 2021. The purpose is to make sure that we are not spending too much time being sedentary. We want to get up and move, breathe fresh air, and enjoy nature. When we don’t set goals, it is easy to just slip into the routine of sitting around staring at screens in our free time instead of doing other, much more worthwhile things.
For myself, I know it is so easy to pull my phone out in the minutes in between tasks to check social media or the news. Then I get sucked into an article or video and use more time than I intended. Or after everything is cleaned up for the night and the kids head to bed, again I take out my phone and scroll when what I really wanted to do was read for a while. I tried setting parameters on my phone time, but that was a struggle! Sorry to say I didn’t stick with it, but I’m going to try again.
Kids are naturally more active and don’t need as much intervention to want or play outside. But even they can get lost in the doldrums of screen time when the weather is not ideal or I have too much on my plate for an outing. If we are not intentional about our outside time, it goes by the wayside.
We are behind the pace to get to five hundred by December 31, 2021. But we are currently half way there. I’m not at all discouraged by this because our first year at setting goals for hours outside, we barely squeaked by with one hundred fifty! This year it is the beginning of September and we have already passed 250. What?! If you had told me two years ago that we could do this I would have called you C-R-A-Z-Y!
I’ve been following the 1000hoursoutside Instagram for a while and enjoying all the adventures that they highlight. Families all around the world send in photos of their time spent in nature and the account shares them. It inspires me to keep going.
I realized recently that having the goal of 1000 hours is not as insane or impossible as I first thought. Lots of families who participate in the challenge don’t make it to one thousand. It’s not about the destination of reaching that golden number. It is about the journey that we take as a family when we have a shared goal and love being together.
We didn’t reach our three hundred hour goal in 2020 and I wasn’t too bothered by it because we came really close. We might not make our five hundred this year, but we will blow three hundred out of the water for sure! I’d say that the journey is going pretty well by that standard. You should join us in this community of outdoors loving families. Visit us on Instagram @trialfamilylife. We would love to share your photos too.