“Life is not about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.” – George Bernard Shaw
This blog/website has undergone a few changes over the years, including name changes and content changes. I decided to stick to “Found in the Forest” because so much of my early hiking, and Appalachian Trail trips were about finding myself post-divorce. The more time and work I put into “finding” myself, the more I realize that I am more like a snake that sheds its skin. The underlying patterns that make up who I am will always be there. There have been times I just ignored that and tried to be someone I’m not. There are a few sets of discarded Liz-Snake-Skin that make me cringe. I spent years trying to keep up appearances, trying to force myself to fall in love again, years I let myself be sucked into the promise of fools gold. It has been doing the work on the areas of self-improvement I’ve resisted the most that has made the biggest difference in my life the last few months – spirituality and nutrition. Taking this course on Insight Timer by Kenneth Soares (it requires the membership version. I am not endorsed by anyone, but I will recommend what has helped me) sparked real, tangible change in my life. Like Shaw’s quote above, I am no longer focused on finding myself. I am creating myself.
Ken and I got to spend a week in Key West, Florida to ring in 2025. I can’t even try to describe how stressful a year 2024 was for Ken and I watched him start to burn out while the holidays approached. Doing my meditations, incorporating consistent meditation and spiritual affirmations into my daily routine was inspiring me to live a healthier lifestyle, I felt better, I was sleeping better, I bounced back from stressful moments easier. At the same time, Ken was drowning in work and literally in 5 different states over the course of a few days for his job. All the joy and bliss I felt was total foreign to his reality, and tension grew between us. At one point I said to him “we are capable of great things, but we need to be our best selves in order to achieve our goals.” So we committed to doing just that. I will list the things we did in Key West, and amazing food we ate, but the best parts of Key West came home with us. Together, literally on the same page, in Truman Annex Park and wrote out a list of things we are committed to in 2025.
- Weekly health/well-being check ins on Sunday.
- Quarterly commitment and Uber List (basically our annual family goals) check-ins.
- While apart, make time for a phone call or FaceTime each day.
- Commit to completing guided meditation courses every day.
- Weekly relationship reaffirmations.
- Quarterly physical events, alternating choice (half marathon coming up in 2 weeks!)
- Close the AT gap in 2025 (finishing 18 miles in New York and completing New Jersey)
- Weekly check-ins on our personal goals of creating healthier relationships with alcohol.
- Sunday grocery shopping and meal prep (at least 8 different kinds of fruits and vegetables per trip)
- Limit meat consumption to 3 meals a week.
- Manifest opening the bookstore and discussing the benefits it will bring to the community during weekly check-ins.
- In addition to limiting eating out to once a week, limit recreational travel to once a month, with one exquisite experience a month.
- Utilizing the resources/entertainment/food already available at home to be more fiscally responsible in 2025
- Weekly review of money saved by following our commitment list.
“People do not decide their futures, they decide their habits and their habits decide their futures.” -F.M. Alexander
So we did Key West sober, mostly vegetarian, and active – and we had a great time. We visited a lot of the island’s historical sites and museums. We particularly enjoyed Truman’s Little White House, the Mel Fisher Maritime Museum, a sunset cruise aboard General George Patton’s schooner, When and If, and of course Hemmingway’s Home and the 6-toed cats. It was my first time to Key West, and I had heard about Hemmingway’s house and the cats, but I had no idea about the island’s history of shipwrecks, naval importance nor presidential retreats.
We stayed active by signing up for a weekly pass at Key West Fitness Center, taking a paddle boat tour of the Mangroves with Lazy Dog, running 4 miles, then 10 miles, and finally walking everywhere from the Historic Seaport, the Truman Annex, Old Town and up and down Duval Street. We ate healthy, with a few indulgences. Our favorite spot to eat there was The Cafe, who’s online menu I am still using to try to create healthy, whole food meals at home with a wide variety of vegetables and flavors. A close second, again chalk full of history and the best Key Lime Pie on the island was Blue Heaven.
Cheers to a happy, healthy and prosperous 2025!
Liz