2021 New Year’s Ideas for Nice, Outdoorsy People Who Got a Little Beat Up By 2020
Maggie Slepian
I had two resolutions for 2020: The first was to thru-hike the PCT, and the second was to finish one (ONE!) cross-stitch. As far as lofty goals went, those two seemed like low-hanging fruit. If you don’t know how the PCT story ended, you can take a guess that starts with a pandemic and ends with the same pandemic. Consequently, I spent much of 2020 sitting in my living room staring at the wall, so you’d think I would have finished my majestic wolf cross-stitch. Alas, I was busy doom-scrolling, losing my job, and pumping out ghost-written listicles, so I did not finish the cross stitch. That makes me 0/2 for 2020, so with that in mind, let’s set some generic goals for the upcoming year.
The era of setting hard resolutions is (at least temporarily) behind us, except for bite-size goals like “don’t let more than 10 seltzer cans pile up on the windowsill,” or “stop spending so much money on cat clothes.” So the following are more overarching goals, left as open-ended as possible. This makes it possible for other Nice Outdoorsy People to plug them into their own inspirational planner and mold them to fit their ideas for the upcoming year.
Hiking Great Basin
1) Hike… Something
This is a much more reasonable goal than the PCT, given These Unprecedented Times. Maybe we won’t set Triple Crown Trail goals, thousand-mile plans, or anything concrete. Perhaps our goals for this year can be to just hike a trail. Any trail. Somewhere. In addition to reduced pressure at the potential collapse of a six-month hiking plan, leaving your ideas more open gives you the chance to get back to the basics, see new places, explore trails you wouldn’t have otherwise considered, and appreciate the landscape in your own backyard.
2) Learn a new skill
Or, enhance a skill you already have. This was a year of picking up hobbies, improving skills, and developing new interests. Have you always wanted to navigate with a map and compass? Learn with online videos and courses, then go practice those skills (within reason) on your local trail system. Maybe you stopped painting years ago—pick it back up. Have you always dreamed of sewing matching outfits for yourself and your cat? No? Ok. Regardless, you’re never the wrong age to take an online class, experiment with a new cooking technique, or learn how to repair your own bicycle.
3) Make at least a small difference to someone
My parents drilled one thing into our heads growing up: be a nice person. Their idea was this: you never know what kind of a day someone is having. A small act of kindness, like spending a few minutes chatting with the grocery store clerk, sending a surprise postcard to an old friend, or helping someone dig their car out of a snowbank, might make a bigger difference than you could ever know. It doesn’t take much effort to be nice, and if you brighten someone’s day, the ripple effect spreads to those around them.
4) Support small businesses
I’ve seen this trend spreading over this past holiday season, and I was happy to be able to contribute. The convenience of big-box stores and monsters like Amazon are so hard to resist, but you can do it! Shop small businesses, support local retailers, buy art. A $50 purchase means nothing to a major online outlet, but it can buy a weeks’ worth of groceries for the person making cat earrings on Etsy.
Delivering Senior Groceries
6) Good grief, less screen time
I can’t be the only one who feels personally victimized by their weekly screen-time report. I spend so much time staring at a screen that my eyes get blurry and my thumb cramps from scrolling. This is a dreadful thing to put out in public, but maybe if I am up front with my screen-time shame, I’ll be forced to make positive changes, like spend those evening hours finishing a wolf cross stitch or something.
7) Reduce! Your! Waste!
Sustainability took a nosedive this year. From discarded single-use masks fluttering down the sidewalk to the jaw-dropping amount of plastic wrap deployed to enhance protections for food items, it was pretty gut-wrenching to see how the movement away from single-use items regressed this year. I understand a lot of this was out of necessity, and oftentimes reusable or shared items just weren’t safe to use in the throes of a pandemic. Even if you aren’t a zero-waste household, make a few small changes. Buy a bamboo toothbrush and those weird chewable toothpaste tabs, stop forgetting your reusable bags, repair your gear instead of throwing it away. It all adds up.
@thefreeoutside Fishing
8) If you believe in science, equal rights, conservation, and the basic good of humanity, be loud about it
There are a lot of good people in this world, quietly going about their days taking their flattened cardboard to the recycling center, donating time and resources to social justice movements, and believing in science. Those acts and beliefs can get buried under the loudest voices though, the ones who deface memorial statues, deny the science of vaccines, or for some mind-blowing reason, still refuse to wear a mask to protect their vulnerable neighbors. This year, make it a point to be (graciously) louder than those voices.
