Outside is Important

I was going to start this 'blog entry with something about how good I am to be posting another so soon after the previous one, only, upon checking, it's been nearly three weeks, which isn't so good. If this was a teacher's report it would say: 'should do better'.

Anywho, on with the 'blog.

Outside is important, and it's also important that we remember that it is important.

I don't want this entry to turn into a moan about how good things were in 'my day', I mean, I'm only 25, hopefully 'my day' is still happening. Having said that, when I was a little smaller than I am now things were very much different, you couldn't chat to your friends while attacking them with virtual spoons, or kill zombies in HD, in fact, there was no HD, there was only D, and the internet didn't happen as soon as you clicked on that Google Chrome icon, you had to wait for it to dial-up. Tough times. Tough times indeed. With the fantastic amount of technology that almost everyone now has at their fingertips and, if not in their pockets, then not far off, pretty much everyone can experience so much more without having to leave the comfort of their sofa or other chair of choice. This is fine, this is progress, and I'm not against it, but it's important to remember that outside is important. Pictures of forests do not beat actual forests*.

*although, they are pretty cool

And therein lies my point. Whilst it's amazing that we can see that picture of a Grey Seal surfacing, or the sun slicing through the canopy of a dense wood pretty much as soon as it's taken thanks to Facebook or Flikr or whatever, the pictures are no substitute for actual having experienced them. The pictures are impressive, no doubt, but there's no sound, no smell, and they are but a tiny, brief moment of what should've been a much larger, much more enveloping journey. This is also true for games. Computer games are awesome, I love 'em, recently I won the Champion's League with Dagenham and Redbridge on Fifa11, it was great. It was not as great as the camaraderie and exhilaration that comes from an actual football match, whether a kick-about or a competitive game. And that's without having even gone into fitness and all that stuff.

Learn about body-language, inter-personal skills, tracking, trekking, animal identification, wild-foods wilderness survival... all whilst getting a tan, or getting fit, or maybe both, see? Multi-tasking.

Basically, what I'm trying to say is that it's important that we don't allow ourselves to get cooped up and absorbed by a computer, or the internet, or inside in general, experience the outdoors, don't just be the person who looks at the pictures and clicks 'like' before forgetting about it, be the person who gets to take the pictures, be the person who gets the first hand experience.

Do it! Or I'll tell my Mum on you.