On the Trail With Dayle: Finding Lost Motivation
"Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature. It will never fail you.”
-Frank Lloyd Wright
For the past few weeks, I have lacked the motivation to go walking on trails around Bozeman. This has been especially true since I returned from vacations with family in Costa Rica and Belize. Admittedly, I did not do much walking in those countries—mostly because it usually seemed too hot during daylight hours.
Since I’ve been home, the weather has been nearly perfect. I have tried to dig deeper into the reasons for my lack of walking enthusiasm. Physical issues did have something to do with it. Earlier this winter, I had a condition that made me want to always be within a few minutes of a bathroom or porta-potty. Then, in late February, I twisted my ankle. Both situations have been successfully treated and are 95 percent resolved, so health is not an excuse!
As I see it, I got out of my walking habit (for a variety of reasons) and needed something like a “kick in the rear” to get back into my usual routine. I tried yelling at myself that I really SHOULD be doing better, that I SHOULD get out of this slump, and that I SHOULD be walking more because my goal is to walk all GVLT trails before the end of the summer. I was spouting lots of SHOULDs, putting more pressure on myself, and still not getting out on a trail.
So, I stopped the internal yelling (which never works for me anyway) and decided to write my column about finding lost motivation. That simple change in attitude flipped the necessary switch in my brain and, for the past three days, I’m back on a track to walk 5,000 to 7,000 steps per day—mostly on our beautiful trails. Is this small change really the only attitude adjustment that I made? Honestly, no. The other important change was that I told myself to go as slow as I needed and to take as many bench and water breaks as I wanted.
The Frank Lloyd Wright quote at the top of this article also played a role. I realized that if I truly trusted nature, stayed close to nature, and studied nature, it would not fail me. With that, today I packed up my iPhone apps, my brand-new binoculars, plenty of water, and headed out to one of my favorite trails—Triple Tree—with a new attitude. And nature did not fail me. Even before I turned onto Triple Tree Road, my spirits were lifted by the bright green grass in the fields and the bright green leaves on the aspen trees.
Once I got onto the trail, I took my time and smelled the roses! There were no roses, but plenty of white Pacific Trillium and yellow Avalanche Lilies lined both sides of the trail in some places. I have never identified either of those wildflowers until today, when I took the time to study and enjoy them using my Picture This app. I also took many butterfly photos, hoping they might be Monarchs returning from Mexico, but they were Polygonia who overwinter here as adults. I am now searching for an accurate app to identify butterflies and other insects along the lines of Picture This or Merlin Bird ID. If you know of one, please let me know.
Over the past two days of walking, my new binoculars have stayed in my backpack. I am certain that there will be plenty of places to use them on Bozeman and other trails as I get back out on a regular basis. I see them as another tool, like my plant and bird apps, to increase my enjoyment of nature and help me find my motivation for walking in all kinds of weather. On the trail today, I thought about the Artemis astronauts' recently coined term “moon joy.” So long as I can stay connected to my “nature joy,” I’ll be out there on the trail.