travel and rhum

Hi all!

Long time lurker and first time poster 🙂

I've been hiking local trails for the past few years, and though I'd still consider myself to be a noobie hiker, I've learned a lot of life lessons from hiking that have nothing directly to do with hiking.

My question to r/hiking is: What have you learned from hiking that has nothing to do with hiking?

Here are some things I've learned:

1. I can do hard things
   I know that this kind of sounds obvious, but as a person who previously held the limited belief that I was not athletic (more on that later), I always limited myself physically and mentally. I thought that because I couldn't easily do things at that moment I'd never be able to do it. I'm a very anxious person and tend to overthink myself out of trying things that are both new to me and that I know will be a challenge. When I started hiking, I was hesitant to take on hiking trails that were longer than a few miles and more challenging than a few hundred feet of elevation. But when I started off and my mom was picking the hiking trails, I was put in a situation where a challenge wasn't easy to back out of and forced to do the hard things. To my surprise, I got better and the hard thing wasn't as hard as it used to be. Suddenly other things I'd considered to hard to try seemed more approachable.
2. Athletism ≠ competition
   As I mentioned before, I live with a fair amount of anxiety and the idea of competing with someone is very off-putting to me. I don't have the inner drive to win at most things. The idea of someone else being better than me at something doesn't both me. I'm not a competitive person. As someone whose "competitive" sports experience is limited to a soccer team of five year olds called The Dinky Dinosaurs, I always thought my lack of competitive spirit meant I'd never be athletic. I was wrong. Once I started hiking regularly I realized that I didn't need to compete with anyone in order to be what I consider to be athletic (muscularly and cardiovascularly fit).
3. It's possible to peacefully be alone with yourself
   I'm a millennial. Beginning in my early teenage years, I was surrounded by social media and easy distractions. I live in a world where staring into space and thinking is more rare than it used to be. I previously considered being alone with my thoughts as a scary concept. I've struggled with depression in the past and that taught me that the two minutes it took me to brush my teeth were two minutes where all of the negative noise music, podcasts, and TikTok were drowning out all day could sneak up on me. For that reason, I avoided being alone with my thoughts at all costs. I consider hiking with headphones in to not be super safe (I re-learned this lesson recently when I almost stepped on a rattlesnake). Once I started really getting into hiking and going on more solo hikes I was in a situation where I was alone with my thoughts and sounds of nature. At first, those negative thoughts that I feared snuck up, but after a while they passed and I was able to explore deeper topics I usually avoided like my future, my self-worth, and my overall attitude toward life. The result was me coming to realizations like the aforementioned, I can do hard things.

Having realized that I've learned all of these things that don't directly have to do with hiking while hiking, I'm curious what other hikers' experiences are. What life lessons has hiking taught you?

The face full of webs gets old.

Maybe one day it'll be a radioactive web and turn me into Superhiker.