Blog: The Motherlode

Right. Brace yourselves. Today I’m going to take two happily and clearly defined terms from two very different fields of study — literary theory and couples therapy — and invalidate both by applying them to a tangential third: your life.

1. Negative Capability

The poet John Keats coined and defined the term ‘negative capability’ in a private letter to his brothers:

when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason

Keats presents this as a good thing, his poetic model being none other than William P. Shakespeare, who erases himself as an authorial voice in the text and instead lets his characters roam free range over the whole of human thought, belief and action, without ever tapping the audience on the shoulder.

This suspension of the judging, grasping author is a lovely concept to define and negative capability has burrowed its way into the everyday language of psychotherapy and mindfulness.

For the mindfulness buffalo, negative capability is a fourth possible response to any stressful situation: we can fight, flight, freeze — or we can sit with the uncertainty.

For the psychotherapy bison, starting with the work of Wilfrid Bion (as previously in these pages), negative capability represents an openness to being rather than knowing.

In all three use cases — aesthetics, mindfulness and psychotherapy — negative capability is a virtue to be sought after.

But what about when, in spite of all our poetry readings, deep breaths and counselling sessions, uncertainty simply won’t stop feeling uncomfortable?

What happens when good negative capability goes bad?

2. Stable Ambiguity

Originally coined (it seems) by couples therapist Terry Real, Esther Perel defines stable ambiguity in the context of romantic relationships where people feel ‘too afraid to be alone, but unwilling to fully engage in intimacy building’.

This results in relationships with unclear status, blurred lines and prolonged break-ups, as one or more people are held in a ‘holding pattern’.

As Perel writes:

We want to have our cake and eat it too. We want to have someone available to cozy-up with when it’s snowing, but if something better comes along, we want the freedom to explore.

In this relationship culture, expectations and trust are in constant question. The state of stable ambiguity inevitably creates an atmosphere where at least one person feels lingering uncertainty, and neither person feels truly appreciated or nurtured.

Perel is clear: stable ambiguity is baaad.

But hang on. Don’t people who feel like they’re being kept in a ‘holding pattern’ just need to up their negative capability game?

Speaking like this, theoretically, on the page, the answer to that question might seem obvious — but what about when you’re actually in the moment, living this experience?

How can we tell when a situation is one that calls for negative capability and when it’s a stalemate of stable ambiguity?

Even more tricky: how can we tell when a situation flips (or more likely slides) from one to the other?

Even more more tricky: what if we take these questions out of the messy world of romance and into the even messier world of The World?

It’s one thing figuring out when your lover is ghosting, icing or simmering you, but it’s quite another to pick the bones out of the zillions of other relationships we ride throughout our lives.

And uncertainty pops up everywhere: office politics and geopolitics, macroeconomics and home finances, every time we catch the bus, every time we hit the road, the state of our house plants, the state of our biosphere.

How can we tell when we need to breathe through our pettifogging whinny-worries and when we need to bloody well do something because, quite frankly, we’re getting mugged off real nasty?

Maybe you’ve got the answer. The best I can do right now is make some lists.

Feelings That Might Indicate Stable Ambiguity

• I want control
• I want my freedom, choice and to keep my options open
• I don’t want responsibility
• I act alone, as an individual
• I need to know
• I am grasping or pushing for something
• I will live forever

Feelings That Might Indicate Negative Capability

• I have faith
• I am committed
• I act with others, as part of something greater
• I want responsibility
• I surrender
• I am open to being
• I am in awe
• I will never know
• I will die

I’ve been pretty stressed over the last couple of weeks: a growing feeling of pressure that I recognise with dread from last year.

Shutdown cramped fog-brain.

Last year, with the help of my counsellor, I was able to draw some good lessons from the opaque nastiness:

• The opposite of control is trust
• Responsibility is a powerful force: share it around or you’ll get fried

But it’s one thing to learn my lessons, it’s another thing entirely to be able to intervene decisively, in the shadow of the darkest fog, to give myself the best chance of rising strong.

For that, we’ll need more powerful medicine…

Data

Do you know exactly how you were feeling a year ago today?

I do.

At 2pm on 12 May 2022, I was feeling a ‘not bad’ bog standard 3 out of 5. For context, here’s what I noted down at the time:

Working on the newsletter. Tired the last couple of days. Rising stress with Thighs?

You see, most days, I log how I’m feeling using a nifty little app that my dad made for me during the first Covid lockdown.

It’s dead simple: at a random time in the day, a box pops up on my computer and asks me how I’m feeling on a scale of 1 to 5. I can then add a few notes for context.

I’ve logged 644 days since September 2020 — almost exactly two thirds of available days — so there’s a good bunch of data in there now.

From all this delicious data, I can tell you that my average wellbeing score is 3.24.

I’d say that was a bit better than not bad, edging, in that very English way, towards pretty good.

I can also tell you that, contrary to the unfounded assertion of TS Eliot, April is not the cruellest month, but my happiest — and by some distance too.

Over the past three years, April scores an average of 3.63. The next happiest months are May and November, both scoring 3.33.

On the shoulder of summer, I think April takes me by delight with its leafy freshness, frisky birdsong and moony evenings.

While the April thing was unexpected, entirely predictable is my score from June last year, the nadir of my brain foggy symptoms.

June 2022 ~ May 2023

From 20 logged days, June 2022 scored a shocking 2.65 — a full 1.08 points lower than April of the same year.

Looking back over my text comments, it’s easy to see that I really wasn’t feeling great for a full fortnight in the second half of the month:

Woozy. Skin tender. Heady. Took painkillers. Hot. It is hot though.

Tired and heady and throaty. Sunny, hot. I felt better on Monday when it was cooler…

Just absolutely zapped. Another nap today. I thought this morning I was feeling a bit more energetic. Throat and nose better. But a headache (wine?!)

Just bumping along at the bottom. A bit heady. A bit sinusy. A bit tiredy. 2 weeks now…

What’s worrying is that these comments could have been written at any point this week. Here are my notes from the past two days:

Really tired today. Yesterday irritable. Today just whacked. Hot and headachey. Exhausted. Went for a run this morning and a meditate. Urgh.

Headache. Tired. Just classic brain foggy symptoms like last year. Stress? So what’s the solution, if any? I’m struggling to write, struggling to see the positive.

Just to be clear: I’m not worried that I don’t feel 5 out of 5 every single day — I’m human, after all.

No: I’m worried because I really don’t want to repeat how I responded to my lowest feelings last year.

2022: The Rest Recipe

Last year, my approach was to cancel things — often social activities — in a desperate attempt to create a feeling of space.

I cancelled a weekend of outdoor instructing. I stayed at home when my friends went for a bike ride in the New Forest. I even cancelled a big part of my fortieth birthday party — and, worse, forced everyone to meet me in Basingstoke.

Now. This urge to cancel isn’t an obviously stupid idea. I was feeling physically and mentally drained; it’s not insane to think that I needed to rest.

Indeed, the internet is littered with countless stress-busting blog posts featuring variations on the rest recipe:

1. Cancel stuff to make space for yourself
2. Run a bath, ideally with bubbles
3. Light a candle
4. Put on some whale song
5. Read a book

The only problem with this approach, for me, is that it didn’t work — and often left me feeling worse.

So what might work for me?

In the words of the Michael J Fox movie that never was, it’s time to go…

Back To The Data!

Let’s flip over and look at what happened on the 23 days since 2020 when I have logged the top wellbeing score of 5.

What do these days have in common?

For starters, no fewer than a quarter of my best days have landed in Aprils, but besides that, I’ve identified three themes to my notes.

1. Active Time Outdoors

Sunny. Out all day, more or less. Saw G. Run, skate, walk.

18km walk. Sunny. Dartmoor. Slow morning reading. I was tired yesterday, but today’s walk and sun really energised me. Relaxing?! B came down in the evening.

Freezing cold toes, but loving the ride. In a community wood after burger and chips at Scotland’s best takeaway 2021 in Burntisland.

2. Seeing Friends And Family

Apart from getting soaked… Had a lovely morning with mum and dad, second breakfast at Chineside. Then cycled 50km with G and J!

So nice to be with thighs and eating amazing food! Super sunny too! H, G, E, J, J, A, F, I!

Tiredish, but happy to be here and with C. Faffed on the computer for ages, but then got a bit of focus on Monday Tasks.

3. Tired Contentment From The Feeling Of Having Been Well Used

I think this is my favourite commonality to my best days.

Tired, but content. Felt woozy a little earlier. One sneeze. Fluey!? DofE.

Tired, but great. Moon rising. Just got back from a great day’s walking in Dartmoor. Sunny, mostly. Gorgeous evening. Got back safe. Lovely, wind-chapped. Well used.

The thing that really jumps out at me from this analysis of my notes is that tiredness, discomfort, unproductivity and even flu symptoms don’t always mean I feel like shit.

Remember: these are days when I maxed out on happiness.

Physical and mental exhaustion can leave me feeling incredible.

2023: The Release Recipe

While I understand that the rest recipe is nice and can make space for pressure to dissipate, the evidence would suggest that, personally, I get much more out of the complete opposite:

1. Instead of cancelling, commit to ecstatic (and probably social) experiences to build pressure
2. Dance, sing, play
3. Trip, meditate, pray
4. Get sweaty, get sexy, get fresh air
5. Then — boom! — let all that pressure go in a cathartic release

A good example of this was last week, when I travelled up to London to go and see Yard Act, not once, but twice, two nights in a row.

On the face of it, this was self-destructive behaviour. I wasn’t feeling great when I left home on Thursday lunchtime and I lost half a day of work and two nights of good sleep.

But that doesn’t even begin to capture what I gained.

The euphoria of the catharsis, the release, stayed with me all day on Friday and Saturday and, even though I was tired, I got plenty of good work done.

From Rest To Release

Just to be clear: I’m not against bubble baths.

I think the rest recipe might work well for people who lose their sense of self in the stress of their lives — those who feel that they are always serving others, perhaps.

They’d be justified (perhaps) in wanting a little more me-time.

But my stress is different: it’s the stress of too much me-time and, specifically, too much me-indoors-time.

It is my I that feels the responsibility of organising a 5,400km bike trip for 104 people and it is my I that works and (most often) lives alone, indoors, in front of this computer screen.

So it makes sense that creating more space for my I to be alone wouldn’t work too well at relieving the pressure.

What I need is to lose my I, forget my I, subsume my I to the ecstasy of the sublime experience. To get out of my head.

Even last year, with stress building to what felt like breaking point, the moment the wheels started turning and we set off from Glasgow with that first group of wonderful cyclists, every drop of stress fell away, released into the air.

If it’s release rather than rest that I need, then there’s simply no point cancelling things to create a sense of space.

This year, I’m determined to do the opposite: commit to much more time losing control in order to create a sense of release.

If the way I felt after going to see Yard Act (twice) is any guide, then this approach is also going to be a lot more fun than a bath — with or without bubbles.

~

ps: After writing two thirds of this newsletter, on Thursday, I left my computer and cycled out into the sundown to meet friends on the beach for pizza.

✔️ Outdoors

✔️ Friends

✔️ Well Used

It’ll surprise none of you to hear that I felt much better.

Thanks to G (👋) for the pizza, B & M (👋) for the dance, and C (👋) for the original inspiration.

What story do you and your team repeat over and over to each other, until that story becomes the unquestioned, unquestionable only story?

Would you maybe benefit from a change of story?

This is a serious analysis of the Russian ‘firehose of falsehood’ propaganda model, but — besides offering protection against such tactics — it made me think about how these cognitive biases show up in our daily lives, in the stories (or propaganda) that we repeat to ourselves and to those in our inner circle.

Repeated exposure to a statement has been shown to increase its acceptance as true.

The “illusory truth effect” is well documented, whereby people rate statements as more truthful, valid, and believable when they have encountered those statements previously than when they are new statements.

Even with preposterous stories and urban legends, those who have heard them multiple times are more likely to believe that they are true.

If an individual is already familiar with an argument or claim (has seen it before, for example), they process it less carefully, often failing to discriminate weak arguments from strong arguments.

This is a good example of what I think is a fairly healthy general principle for approaching scary news: zoom the fuck out, then zoom the fuck in.

Zoom The Fuck Out

Catch yourself getting caught up.

Putin is singlehandedly destroying truth!

Hold on. Stop the doomspread.

Look around you: does life go on? Does the sun still shine? Does your dog still love you? Is the heat death of the universe more than a lifetime away?

Then Zoom The Fuck In

How can you use the struggle of existence, the struggle of reading this article and grappling with its consequences, to become a better player for Team Human, right now?

Okay. Go and do that, then.

Today’s story is the statement of the bleeding obvious.

Stuff is hard.

Anything worth doing is a struggle.

We know this.

To pick up on last week’s story (co-written, in a way, by Mohammed Salah): the struggle is the process, the only way to do anything worth doing.

The struggle is where the value is at. So why does the struggle have to feel like such a struggle?

Well, it doesn’t.

It’s A Mindset Thing

As I’ve written before, we have two mindsets and we jump between them like monkeys between the trees of a forest.

Our fixed mindset:

• Skills aren’t learnt; they’re natural talents
• You can’t teach an old dog new tricks
• This should be easy; if it’s not easy, it’s impossible
• Better to avoid completion than to risk exposing ourselves as frauds
• Deal with problems and setbacks as we’d wish them to be
• Results above all

Our growth mindset:

• All skills are learned (some are just learned so young that we’ve forgotten how)
• If anything, old dogs have an advantage, building new tricks on old foundations
• Value patience, persistence, perspiration and process over defeatist ‘shoulds’ or impossible ‘can’ts’.
• Better to admit our ignorance and learn by asking for help
• Deal with problems and setbacks as they truly are
• Process above all

It’s not that our brains are all either 100 percent fixed or growth, by the way — if you think that, then you’ve got a fixed mindset about mindsets.

You will access both mindsets at different times in your life, in different domains. Maybe you’re a creative in the kitchen, but a despot at your desktop.

That should be enough to show that you can choose between them.

Anything worth doing quite often shows up first as a fixed mindset struggle: an obnoxious obstacle to be effortlessly overcome by our natural genius.

In this case, only success can be a success.

But we can also frame it as a growth mindset struggle: a roll in the hay, a game to play.

In this case, taking part — stepping into the arena and grappling with what’s before us — that is the only success.

Alternate Realities

Our two mindsets make such a difference to our lived experience that switching between the two feels like switching between alternate realities.

Imagine travelling to Paris for the first time in your life with a fixed mindset:

• You can’t learn a word of French because your language ability is fixed at zero. Alternatively, you feel you ought to be good at French because you got an A at GCSE, but you don’t risk crashtesting any actual conversation because you might get something wrong.
• You’re suspicious that every Parisian waiter is out to destroy you because you once read a Guardian article on the topic. As a result, you don’t stray beyond familiar transglobal eateries like Subway and McDonalds.
• You’ve not got much to report when you get home, besides a desultory slideshow that might have well have been Xeroxed from your thinly used copy of Lonely Planet Paris.

An otherwise identical traveller with a growth mindset might as well be in another universe:

• You don’t know a word of French, but that doesn’t stop you trying and failing repeatedly, slowly improving over the weekend, but never really getting beyond good-humoured willingness.
• Some Parisians visibly wince when you say ‘Bon-jaw’, but others laugh kindly and help you translate the menu of the irresistibly crowded brasserie that you stumbled across on your late night ramble across town.
• Your new friends show you a secret tunnel that leads down into the catacombs and, when you get home, everyone’s badgering you to tell that story again about your night dancing to a Brazilian funk band in the bunker underneath Saint Lazare station or the grisly tale of what you found in The Room Of Cats.

A Game We Never Want To End

Our fixed mindset is quite often based in a false world of apriori paradigms, often learnt by rote in childhood: a world of imagined shoulds and oughts.

Only if you think you can, will you. If you think you can’t, well, you won’t.

By contrast, our growth mindset is rooted in the real world of a posteriori experimentation: a world of constant trial and error.

Whether you think you can or you think you can’t yet, you will try and try again.

The difference between the two realities of the fixed and growth travellers is the difference between (our worst possible definition of) work and (our best possible definition of) play.

The best games make us curious, experimental, vulnerable and willing to learn.

They make us willing to play again, over and over, building on and testing our skills, enjoying the pleasure of the flow more than the endgame of victory or defeat.

The very best games we never want to end at all.

From inside a growth mindset, life itself feels like a game we never want to end.

The Only Winning Move Is Not To Play?

And now: a warning against pointlessness.

It’s an astonishing fact that almost every time we do anything, we probably could have got away with doing nothing at all.

In some cases, we would have been better off doing nothing at all.

Sometimes, when I publish this newsletter, I end up with fewer subscribers than I had before I sent it.

Was it worth my while putting hours of work into writing the damn thing?

As Jason Kottke noticed back in 2018, this better-doing-nothing conundrum also features in the work of newspaper proprietors, baseball superstars and most business entrepreneurs.

Kottke quotes from a remarkable-sounding book called Disclosing New Worlds: Entrepreneurship, Democratic Action, and the Cultivation of Solidarity by Charles Spinosa, Fernando Flores and Hubert Dreyfus:

Business owners do not normally work for money either. They work for the enjoyment of their competitive skill, in the context of a life where competing skilfully makes sense. The money they earn supports this way of life. […]

Saying that the point of business is to produce profit is like saying that the whole point of playing basketball is to make as many baskets as possible. One could make many more baskets by having no opponent.

What this means is that the value of almost everything we do comes down which mindset we apply: are we focussed on fixed results or growth process?

So the motivation of my writing this story cannot be found in what value it might hypothetically bring for an unknown number of readers, sometime in the future.

That would be a fixed mindset idea of value.

The motivation — and immediate value — is found in what the process of writing does for me, at this very moment.

That sets the growth mindset in play. The pressure’s off. I can enjoy myself, experiment and be curious about what I learn next.

I don’t need you to love every word, but, all the same, I hope you found something to take away with you today.

Why This, Why Now

On Wednesday night, there was a football game.

But, if you live in the UK, you knew that already.

You’re either:

• one of the 48 percent of the population who actively follow football;
• or one of the 99 percent of the population whose lives are in some way affected by results, through the miserable or euphoric emotional scars they leave on the 48 percent.

For years, I’ve shied away from writing this piece because I thought it would be numbingly boring to people who aren’t sports fans.

But I’ve come to realise that, in the non-words of semi-mythical Liverpool FC ur-manager Bill Shankly: ‘It’s more important than that.’

Both sides of the 48 percent divide got in touch with me about the match on Wednesday — one half to help manage the behaviour of fans who put football before family and the other half to help manage the pit of despair that an adverse result had thrown them into.

As my Arsenal-supporting co-thinker (👋) put it:

[I] definitely need to take a leaf out of the David Charles book of How to Be a Zen Football Supporter

So here we are.

I think today’s story has something for anyone who has ever found themselves emotionally over-invested in the lives of strangers — or for those seeking to understand and support those of us who do find ourselves getting into mental muddles over events completely out of our control.

What Bill Shankly Actually Said

Bill Shankly was the charismatic manager and coach of Liverpool Football Club between 1959 and 1974.

Shankly was the man who ‘created the idea of Liverpool’ by binding players and supporters together in a socialist pact where everyone works for each other and everyone shares in the rewards.

Under Shankly, Liverpool fans adopted their pop-song anthem You’ll Never Walk Alone and invented the concept of crowd participation through song, something fans all over the world do today.

In the 60s, 70s and 80s, this unity between players, club and fans turned Liverpool FC into a titan of the sport: a position they still hold sixty years after Shankly arrived.

There’s an enduring myth that Bill Shankly once declared that football is more important than life and death.

He never said that.

Shankly said only that the game had been more important than life and death to him — and, speaking months before his death, he confessed that he regretted his decision to put football above the suffering of his own family.

And, the thing is, Bill Shankly’s results as Liverpool manager weren’t even that good.

Don’t get me wrong: he was successful, but his Liverpool sides didn’t dominate in the manner of later Liverpool managers in the 1970-80s, Alex Ferguson’s Manchester United in the 1990-2000s or Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City today.

Shankly won three first division league titles in his fifteen years, his win percentage ranks him eighth out of all Liverpool managers and his team’s average points-per-game would only be good enough for fifth place in today’s Premier League.

Yet there is no one more important at the club, even today.

I tell Shankly’s story to help put two things together:

1. Putting football over family is always a bad decision — not only for fans, but also for those managers and players who couldn’t be more integral to the game.
2. Results, especially trophies, are only a small part of how even the greatest are remembered.

So how did Shankly end up in a position where football, for him, was more important than life and death?

And how did the rest of us get to a place where we’re nodding along with the mythologised version of Shankly’s Regret:

Some people say that football is a matter of life and death. I say they’re wrong. It’s more important than that.

Sublimated Passions, Escapist Self-Regulation

Sport, especially, in the UK, football, is often seen as a ‘safe’ social container for the sublimation of passions whose expression is otherwise unacceptable.

The story goes that sports give supporters the cathartic opportunity to express tribal aggression, screaming joy and tearful heartbreak in public, and — taboo of British taboos — share those emotions with strangers.

We could say that watching a football match is an intense ninety minute practice of emotional self-regulation.

• Our team scores a goal. Can we enjoy the moment, the dopamine, the pleasure, the release, the aesthetic experience, without becoming dependent on more?
• But hold on — the video assistant referee is checking the goal for a very tight offside. Can we ride our anxiety into excitement or will we let it take over and become a jibbering mess?
• After a five minute wait, our team’s goal is disallowed. Can we absorb the blow without being floored, can we recognise that the call was tight and that the aesthetics of the non-goal still stand as a moment to enjoy nonetheless?
• Our team concedes a goal, despite what we thought was a blatent foul in the build-up. What will we do with all this anger, the burning sense of injustice, that’s suddenly arrived?
• Despite all their efforts and energy, our team loses the match. The referee blows their whistle and we’re hit by a taunting, humiliating, triumphant roar from the opposing team’s fans. Can we nevertheless say ‘thanks for a good game, well played’, comfortable in the knowledge that, although this may be disappointing for the players, this isn’t an important life event for us, only practice for those times when, despite all our efforts and energy, things, perhaps genuinely important things, don’t go our way?

Most of the time, unfortunately, supporters (including myself) don’t look at it like this.

We don’t realise that our over-investment in sports is the perfect training ground for our real life emotional triggers and subsequent behaviour.

A Word On Catharsis

I believe that sports offer one significant advantage over other art forms when it comes to the psychological benefits of catharsis, the emotional release that comes with the satisfying release of emotion.

You see, generally speaking, the storytelling arts — novels, film and theatre — do the catharsis for you.

When you go and watch a play, you’re taken on an Aristotelian journey of conflict and resolution and, assuming the author has done their job well, even when the story is tragic you leave the theatre feeling in some way torn to pieces and made whole again.

This is where sports have the edge. They’re not a pre-designed cathartic story. There is no author.

They’re actually more like a slot machine or Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates: you never know what you’re gonna get.

The conflict is there, but there’s no guarantee of a satisfying resolution — exactly like life. It’s the perfect training ground.

But, far from helping us self-regulate outside the game, our failure to recognise the spiritual practice of spectator sports can mean that, when results don’t go our way, we try to soothe ourselves with yet more ineffective escapist forms of emotional self-regulation: binge drinking, comfort eating, black moods and (let’s not forget) domestic violence, which peaks around football matches.

None of these tactics work, of course, because we are seeking control over something beyond our control. We are addicted to the slot machine.

If anything, approaching sport in this typical and fanatical way is actually damaging to our ability to self-regulate our emotions in real life.

After a bad defeat, only the footballers get the chance to put it right. Spectators don’t.

We either practice Zen Fandom or we lash out.

So where next?

The Dead End Of Giving Up

It’s worth saying that giving up is an option.

It must be liberating to drop that emotional load: to realise the truth that none of this sports circus ever mattered and none of it ever will.

How we use our precious time on earth is a hideous exercise in choosing to not do an infinite number of other wonderful, worthwhile things.

The hours I pump into being the spectator of football matches is necessarily time not spent in realms of connection where I am an active participant and can influence the outcome one way or another.

We must choose between spectating the living experience of celebrity strangers, or participating in the living experience of our own close community.

We can’t have both. 🤷

The temptation to quit altogether is strong. But also, I believe, a bit of a psychological dead end.

Firstly, the idea of giving up spectator sports ignores the fact that football is deeply embedded in UK culture and is extremely hard to disconnect from, especially for those of us with a lifetime of fandom behind us.

Secondly, quitting the sport would be a missed opportunity for growth, especially when a lot of the emotional investment is wrapped up in teenage shame, humiliation and dominance.

Ah.

Fanatical Teenager Energy

When Liverpool win, I am transported (in a symbolic kind of a way) back to school.

I can hold my head up high, look my classmates in the eye and maybe dish out a few crowing remarks to that weekend’s losers as I swagger into the classroom.

In the real world, of course, there is no school and there is no classroom and there are no classmates.

Being a Liverpool fan as an adult has no bearing on my social status whatsoever.

Worse, actually: my chosen designation as a Liverpool fan, despite the hours I put into the role, is functionally meaningless.

There is no higher power here. There is no grand, unifying purpose — of either sport or club — to which I can align myself in daily life.

Liverpool is one of the most ideologically motivated clubs in the world, yet I struggle to see how I can apply the holy commandment ‘pass and move, it’s the Liverpool groove’ to either my writing or my relationships with family and friends.

It really is only a game.

But a part of us stubbornly remains that fanatical teenager — and that’s not a bad thing in itself, if we strive to direct that energy usefully.

And this is where I turn for inspiration to the players.

Every Game As It Comes

Before, during and after any match, including last night’s supposed title decider between Arsenal and Manchester City, you’ll hear managers and players alike trotting out the same old clichés to downplay the game’s importance.

This is typical of what the actual participants in a sport will do: break the game down into components small enough that they can hope to inflence their outcome through the skillful execution of their process.

Winning a league title is an outcome way beyond the ability of any one team, let alone player or manager, to control. A league title is one possible consequence of winning many games in a season.

Hence the cliché ‘take every game as it comes’.

But even the outcome of a single game depends on far too many interrelated complexities for any team, player or manager to control.

Instead, players focus on the tiny things that they can control: their training and preparation and the minute-by-minute execution of tactics and skills.

Nevertheless, winning a single game is only one possible consequence of even perfect execution of the game plan.

That’s why, in defeat as much as in victory, the participants of a game will obsess, not over the result, but over what really matters: process, process, process.

In other words: the opposite of what we as fans do.

We are the ones with the least control over the outcome and we are the only ones who allow ourselves to wallow deep in the disappointment of our team’s defeats and joyride the crest of euphoria long after victory.

That’s the paradox of fandom.

What Would Salah Do?

If a footballer gets too wound up after a heavy defeat, it will have a huge detrimental effect on their performance in the next match and, consequently, everything that they are working towards.

That’s why they train not only their body, but also their mind: so that they can deliver excellence on the pitch no matter what state the game is in.

Imagine — if we spectators could adopt pretty much any modern footballer’s approach to the game, then we might actually enjoy watching!

One of Liverpool’s greatest players, not just of the current team but of all time, is an Egyptian called Mohammed Salah.

Not only is Salah a practising Muslim who marks every goal with the sujud prayer, he’s also been known to celebrate on the pitch by doing a bit of yoga.

Imagine, in the explosion of joy that erupts around you, with your teammates, coaching staff and 50,000 supporters going crazy in your ears, taking a moment to be here:

This celebration, one of several that Salah chose to dedicate to his meditation and yoga practice, came after he scored in the 5-0 win over Huddersfield in April 2019.

The result took Liverpool back to the top of the league table in a season where they would obliterate the all-time record for the most number of points recorded by a team finishing… second.

Now I don’t know exactly why Salah does these celebrations, but they remind me of Rudyard Kipling’s famous lines:

If you can keep your head when all about you
   Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
   But make allowance for their doubting too;
[...]
If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
    If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
   And treat those two impostors just the same 
[...]
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it

Salah is sending a message to any supporter who will listen: calm the fuck down.

In varying degrees, scoring that goal, winning that game and, certainly, winning that 2019 league title were all out of Mohammad Salah’s control. And he was the one on the pitch kicking balls.

This is nothing more than another moment in our lives, Salah was saying.

Soon enough, it will all be over, so let’s breathe, shall we, and leave space to relish what we have, here, now.

The Spiritual Practice Of Spectating

Now, look: this wouldn’t be a practice if it was easy.

If becoming and remaining a world class striker isn’t easy for Mohammed Salah, why should becoming and remaining a world class spectator be any easier?

The emotions around being a football spectator are real and can be gut-wrenching. But we already know, if we’re frank with ourselves, that we grow fastest through adversity.

The harder our emotions are to process, the harder the struggle — and the better we can become as humans. That’s how spectating can become a spiritual practice.

In theory at least, the sports fan should be the best-trained person in the room to manage the hot emotions of anger and injustice of a brewing conflict, or the bitter disappointment and shame of getting fired, or even the temptation to add insult to injury when we triumph over our foes.

We’ve been there so many times before watching our team play, we should be pass masters at this.

But we’re not.

Becoming The Intro-spectator 😂

To turn this around, we need to flip the focus: we need to morph from passive spectator to active intro-spectator.

We should be not so much interested in the consequences of a heavy defeat for the business of The Liverpool Football Club And Athletic Grounds Limited with whom we have zero investment besides this inexplicable and inconsequential emotional attachment, so much as with the consequences of that heavy defeat for our own spiritual growth and emotional stability.

This isn’t about them any more, this is about us.

Any football score, good or bad, is our cue to, yes, feel our emotions, but not allow them complete mastery over us.

In that way, like Mohammad Salah, we better learn how to ride the vicissitudes of life.

If Shankly’s message is a warning about the spiritual danger of becoming over-invested in sport, then Salah’s is a gentle reminder of what we have to gain.

Salah works hard to train his mind for performance on the pitch; his performance on the pitch gives us the opportunity to work hard to train our minds for performance in the world.

Intro-spectating is zero-stakes training for healthy emotional self-regulation in the truly high-stakes moments in our own lives.

Every game we’re drilled on our responses to pleasure, anxiety, excitement, anticipation, goodwill, dread, generosity, anger, graciousness, injustice, gratitude, humiliation and magnanimity.

So let’s practice them.

~

Special thanks this week to DRL (👋) and CW (👋) for the conversations and provocations that led to this ridiculously long piece.

Also Mohammed Salah. YNWA.

Thanks so much for your comments on last week’s oxytocin-fueled smiling at strangers story.

Anna (👋) says ‘Good morning’ to people on her morning runs and reports a better than fifty percent return rate. Paul (👋) shared the ‘two finger smile’ of Ajahn Brahm — a thoroughly silly morning habit that helps transcend the gap between consciousnesses.

This week, we’re going to get serious. With science and everything.

Q: Do you avoid talking to strangers?

Yes? Good. You’re normal. Most people avoid talking to strangers — ‘despite the fact that they are happier when they do so’.

This is not my assertion, but the findings of psychologists Gillian Sandstrom and Erica Boothby from their mini meta-analysis of seven studies that looked at our (annoyingly interrelated) stranger-danger fears:

• We fear that we won’t enjoy the conversation, that we’ll find it awkward or pointless
• …that our conversational partner won’t enjoy the conversation
• …that either ourselves or our partner lack good conversational skills
• …that we won’t like our partner
• ..that our partner won’t like us, will find us boring or straight-up reject us

Ouch.

The good news is that Sandstrom and Boothby found that we’re most anxious about our partner enjoying the conversation and not finding us boring.

We’re not so worried about our partner turning out to be as enthralling as a table lamp.

More proof that, yay, we’re self-obsessed humans!

What else are we?

Sandstrom and Boothby also looked at personality differences between those of us more or less fearful of opening a conversation with a stranger.

There are a few relevant divergences in type (openness, extraversion, self-esteem, conscientiousness), but the one that really jumped out at me was on a measure called SOCIAL CURIOSITY.

(Dunno why I put that in all-caps. Seemed fun at the time.)

There are actually two types of social curiosity: overt (asking people questions = good) and covert (gossiping, snooping or spying on people = bad).

Sandstrom and Boothby found that the more socially curious you are, the less worried you will be about speaking to strangers. Surprise!

Why though?

Unfounded opinion incoming…

I think overt social curiosity is important because it throws the attention away from oneself (Oh god, am I boring? I’m boring you, aren’t I? Boring boring boring beard bus boring) and shines it back on the world-at-large and, in this case, the other person.

This is exciting news. We might be able to dampen our social fears through the disarming curiosity natural to two people meeting for the first time.

What stands out about this person before you? If nothing stands out, then — even more curious — what are they hiding?

I’m not suggesting that you turn every conversation into a social interrogation, but, fuck it, suppose that you do: few would describe even the most casual chat with MI5 or the FBI as ‘boring’.

If overt social curiosity might get us over the hump of opening a conversations, what happens next? Well, according to Sandstrom and Boothby:

Conversations with strangers not only go better than expected, but generally go quite well.

Aw. That’s cute.

Even better, Sandstrom and Boothby offer a few practical suggestions on how to get past our (false) expectations around connecting with strangers.

1. Go back to conversation school

Getting a few tips on how to have good conversations with strangers increased people’s beliefs that both the stranger and themselves would enjoy the conversation.

I don’t know what tips appeared in the studies that Sandstrom and Boothby analysed, but here are a few I’ve picked up over the years:

• Deliver a sincere compliment: ‘Cool shoes!’, ‘Delicious cakes!’, ‘Mad skillz!’
• Add a question to your compliment: ‘Where did you get them?’, ‘What’s the recipe?’, ‘Can you teach me?’
• Comment on your shared context (bonus points for positivity, gratitude and avoiding the weather): ‘This is the best playground’, ‘The quinoa salad is superb’, ‘Tuuuuuuuuuune!’
• Ask a question (non-invasive): ‘That book any good?’, ‘Ooh, is that the quinoa salad?’, ‘Mind if I take this seat?’
• Address the elephant in the room: ‘Sorry I’m so sweaty — that hill is a bitch’, ‘It’s crazy busy in here — come and join our table’, ‘You’re in a good mood today!’

Such anxiety-reducing tips probably make a conversation more likely to happen, but they didn’t improve the actual experience for study participants — because such conversations with strangers tend to go well anyway!

2. Notice the good stuff

Taking the time to reflect on a positive conversation with a stranger, not surprisingly, reduced anxiety about future conversations with strangers.

The more positive experiences we have — and the more vividly we acknowledge that they have indeed happened — the better we’ll feel about seeking out more.

What you don’t want to do is have a shitty conversational experience. That’s a bad thing and, Sandstrom and Boothby found, will likely set you back significantly, especially if you have a tendency to ruminate on upsetting situations. (Like I do.)

Obviously, a shitty experience is not always in your control. What is under your control is putting in the reps.

Have faith in the science that tells us that, not only are we exaggerating our own fears, but that, on balance, positive experiences will vastly outweigh the negative.

Easy said than done, I know. But this is us.

3. Permission granted!

Sandstrom and Boothby also stumbled over a tantalising possibility for a cheap intervention that could lead to more conversations between strangers: simply give yourself permission to talk.

You know this already: there are scenarios where not speaking to strangers is abominably rude.

At a mutual friend’s birthday party, for example, we all have implied permission to conversate with complete unknowns and generally, given enough booze/vol-au-vents/dancing, that is exactly what we do.

But what if we granted each other permission to speak in almost any situation we might share with a stranger?

I’m not saying that a ride on the Underground is exactly the same as attending your friend’s birthday party. But I’m not saying it isn’t a bit the same.

PIVOT!

This is all well and good, but what I’ve come to realise is that, while connecting with strangers is (usually) a beautiful thing, what perhaps we need most is the courage to connect with the people we already know best: our friends.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but I’m certainly not the only one who has: we seem, as a species, to be becoming less tolerant to anything that impinges on our own control of our time.

And that includes connecting with the greatest people in our lives.

Why aren’t I constantly hanging out with my best friends?

Oliver Burkeman, in his zeitgeist-busting must-read Four Thousand Weeks, nails it with characteristic precision:

We might be […] guilty of […] treating our time as something to hoard, when it’s better approached as something to share.

Burkeman argues that our Twenties’ desire to excercise tyrannical control over our time on earth leads directly to ‘the loneliness of the digital nomad’.

The more flexibility we have over our schedules and our living and working lives, the less likely we are to randomly hang out with the same people over and over again, including our very best friends, whose suzerainty over their own schedules leads them to make totally different, autocratic decisions for their living and working lives.

Somehow we never quite align and the less we align, the more fear we have about ceding time-control to others, and the more fear we have, the less we align.

Have you noticed this too?

Many years ago, in a move that I thought would finally grant me total power over my own existence, I chose the path of the keyboard-wrangling freelancer.

Whether it was co-writing a sitcom or interviewing a Nicaraguan agriculturalist on Zoom, I became, on the face of it, independent.

But independence doesn’t mean only independence from the annoying things about working with others — early mornings, deadlines, interruptions, printer jams — it means independence from everything about working with others.

I became independent from the messy business of ‘other people’. You know the ones: the ones you can never fully bring under your control; the ones that, in the final analysis, bring you all the joy.

I may have reduced my dependence on others, I may have reduced interruptions, but I could never eradicate them. Interruptions, as Burkeman irritatingly points out, are inevitable.

In fact, the closest thing to a guarantee in this life is that you will, just as you think you’re really getting somewhere, be interrupted.

And of course, one day, you’ll be interrupted — from an idle daydream, a conversation about something important, or maybe just from the washing up — for the final time.

So, I agree: we need to cede control. Not only control, but our delusions of control.

Especially when those delusions only stop us from relishing, nay, encouraging interruptions of joy.

Stakes is high low

Our anxiety towards strangers is small fry compared to our worry-worry about interrupting — a synonym for ‘spending time with’ — our greatest friends.

That anxiety comes from a false belief that the stakes are high, that we risk irritating our friend and being ourselves rejected:

• We don’t answer the phone to a friend because we fear that, by doing so, we are somehow committing to an hour-long phone call that might take over our day.
• Nor do we phone our friends, not only because we ourselves fear long conversations, but also because we fear we’ll be interrupting them from something more important.
• We don’t drop round a friend’s house because that’s not what’s done these days. What if they’re out? What if they’re busy? We have phones, we could phone them, but instead we send a text and the moment goes unanswered.
• If we do phone them, they don’t answer because See Above and See Above.
• In all cases, reaching out makes us vulnerable to rejection and, frankly, we’re not sure we can handle that.

What we need to do right now is to lower the stakes massively and show that we risk nothing by reaching out to connect.

We do that, not by interrupting our friends less, but by interrupting them more — much more.

As Sandstrom and Boothby showed, only repeated positive experiences can reduce our anxiety over future interactions. And this finding was true of strangers: imagine how powerful the effect with our best friends.

So, let’s give our friendships a new tendency.

Interrupt, gloriously

1. Everything good in life is an interruption from something else. It’s just what you choose in the moment.
2. Expect, and welcome — even demand — friendly interruptions. Many of us are buried deep by habit in lifeless, controlling communication strategies: you will probably need to order your friends to interrupt you. Give them permission.
3. These are your friends: if you’re in the middle of something you can’t pause, tell them so. In a nice way. You are not rejecting them because you’ll interrupt them back later. Or, even better, if you’re struggling with something, tell them so. They love you, so why not rope them into helping?
4. If you interrupt a friend and they say ‘not now’, this is NOT rejection. Chances are, they’re doing something else, possibly with other people. It’s still NOT rejection.
5. If we’re honest, it’s this fear of rejection that often stops us from connecting in the first place. Respond with more reps. Invite people to connect more often, not less, and the sensitivity to rejection will lessen.
6. Don’t write off all your friends because one turned you down on this occasion. Try another. If you run out of friends, say hello to a stranger (see last week).
7. Favour ringing their doorbell over ringing their phone.
8. Don’t use text, voice or video messages for anything that could be a live rendezvous or a phone or video call. Text, voice and video messages are not and will never be the main story: they’re explanatory footnotes, appendices or DVD extras. They only work as an adjunct to the existing foundation of person-to-person synchronous communication.
9. Show your friends that it’s okay to have a two minute phone call. It’s okay to stop by their house merely to exchange pleasantries on the weather. Stakes is low.

If you’re lucky enough to live in a neighbourhood of best friends or if you’re lucky enough to have ‘good enough’ friends, don’t hesitate to interrupt them.

If you live apart from your friends, interrupt them remotely.

If you can’t find friends near or far, interrupt a stranger. It’ll go better than you think.

Whatever you do, interrupt. Loudly, proudly, interrupt, gloriously.

~

Thanks to DRL (👋) for sharing the Sandstrom and Boothby paper with me. Thanks to GC (👋) and LH (👋) for the friendship interruptions chat (and lunch). Thanks to Oliver Burkeman and CW (👋) for bringing it all together.

I get so much from conversations with friends-who-happen-to-be-readers and I hearwith grant you full permissions (without expiry) to comment or email me back with your own experiences or anything at all that pertains to this or any past and indeed future story (or potential future story if you want to start giving me ideas).

I promise you that you’re not boring.

As close readers among you will know, I’ve spent much of the last week in France, visiting friends (👋) in Paris and Chamonix.

If you’ve never been, Chamonix is a terrifying place where people don practical clothing and highly impractical footwear and then throw themselves off actual mountains in a variety of increasingly outlandish ways — strapped to two metal prongs or a single fibreglass plank, dangling off a rope, sometimes deliberately not dangling off a rope, tied with string to an enormous silk bedsheet or, for the truly deranged, wearing nothing more than a big coat with flappy bits, before launching themselves into the sky.

Suffice to say, I did not do any of that. To be honest, even the cable car was a bit much, at least on the way up.

On Monday, however, we took a genteel train (firmly on rails, I noted) from Chamonix up to Montenvers, where the tail of the Mer de Glace shyly uncurls from behind a mountain, spitting out skiers and snowboarders in a gruntling manner that even I confess looks rather fun from a distance.

We ate sandwiches in the sunshine and then hiked back down to town through the snow.

But that’s not what this story is about at all. This story is about being overtaken by excitement in the company of strangers.

Nose pressed against the window of the train, moving slowly enough to catch the eye of passing pedestrians, passengers in crossing trains or midday quaffers at cafés, I started doing this thing that I’d forgotten I do — waving ecstatically, grinning like a loon and throwing out rapturous thumbs up and fist pumps.

Reactions were mixed.

It’s not standard behaviour for an adult, see. Not even for one wearing a bobble hat. Strangers don’t know quite what to do with the incoming data.

Shock and the moving train quite often left no time for any response, but my friend and I enjoyed watching those of relaxed and nimble mind move quickly from confusion, through panic and shyness, to why-the-fuck-not-wave-back?

A bolt of electricity passed between strangers and thus a moment was shared.

I learned this trick off a Polish bear-of-a-man called Marko who I met learning Arabic in Tunisia back in 2008. He was a charismatic fabulist with a thousand and one nights’ worth of tall stories and almost as many uses for the neat vodka in his everyday carry hip flask.

I was never quite sure how much of what he told me was true and how much of it didn’t matter that it wasn’t.

But I’ve never forgotten his audacity and penchant for giving strangers in the street a mighty white smile, thumbs up, high five or, indeed, shoulder bump.

It’s all about being deeply uncool, as confident-lunatic as you can be. And if it works in cooler-than-cool Chamonix, it works anywhere.

Even in London.

Flashback to 2013…

Way back in 2013, I was writing a book called You Are What You Don’t, about the art and science of positive constraints, imaginative twists on the unwritten rules of life.

I experimented with living without things like mobile phones and supermarkets, but also without abstract concepts like borders and walking. It was all about breaking my previously unexamined habits to learn what was really going on underneath (and whether, in truth, it’s more hygienic not to use toilet paper).

Then I decided to transgress that most London of social injunctions: There shalt be no smiling eye contact between strangers.

It all started halfway through reading the following convoluted sentence from the introduction to Mark Boyle’s second book, The Moneyless Manifesto:

While collectively taking off the lens called ‘How much can I get?’ and putting on another labelled […] ‘How many people can I make smile today?’ […] wouldn’t by itself cut the Gordian Knots of climate chaos, […] it would make for a crucial starting point.

Suitably inspired, I started logging smiles on my Nokia’s rudimentary spreadsheet function. I already kept track of all the money I spent, why not log smiles too?

‘I bet I can get a smile out of this’

The first sign that this was a project worth pursuing was on day one when I saw a man in his sixties help a woman with her heavy bag up the steps at Winchmore Hill station.

A few minutes later, I found myself walking behind the man towards my friend Beth’s house (👋). The path was too narrow to overtake comfortably, but he sensed me tripping on his heels, so he turned around and said something like, ‘You’re too fast for me nowadays.’

Normally, I would have just muttered a thanks and walked on, but this time I thought, ‘I bet I can get a smile out of this.’

So I slowed down to his pace and we chatted pleasantly, until we were both bowled out the way by a couple of kids hurtling down the path at us. We shared a smile and a laugh, and I added one to my spreadsheet.

What gets measured, gets motivated.

An oxytocin-fuelled haze of euphoria

I garnered a tidy eight smiles that first day and was pretty pleased with myself, fully expecting future days to hover around a similar mark or lower, considering I spend most of my life cloistered away in my lonely writer’s garret.

Little did I suspect that this innocent smile-gathering game would take total command of my life in an oxytocin-fuelled haze of euphoria.

The game lured me into doing pro-social smile-based deeds, like buying biscuits for an entire indie band I only vaguely knew (four smiles), and pressed me to turn rudimentary human interactions into fully-blown friendly encounters, including the somewhat risky manoeuvre of making my neighbour smile at the urinal.

There was no social opportunity too private to squeeze a smile from a stranger and I learnt that it’s even possible to smile down the telephone: the other person can always tell and, almost imperceptibly, the conversation lightens and brightens.

The Smiler’s Credo

By the end of the first week, I was regularly hitting twenty and thirty smiles a day and I’d developed a full-on smiler’s credo.

Remember, I told myself, even a single shared smile is infinitely and immeasurably precious. A moment spent smiling with another is a moment spent in the company of the divine.

Smiling, I decided, is defiance in the face of the hostility of the universe: it’s how we humans thumb our noses at the vanishing unlikelihood of fate that we should end up existing at all, never mind here and now, together in the same space-time.

If I knew that I could make a stranger smile as I passed them in the street, then surely I had an overwhelming responsibility to do so, without delay.

I’d catch people unawares as they walked from the station to work, sneaking smiles into their commutes. I’d change seats on the train once I’d smiled at all those around me: another carriage awaited my beneficence.

I knew nothing of these people’s lives, but I knew what a surprise smile from a stranger sometimes meant to me. On a dull day when the clouds cover our spirits, sometimes all it takes is an unexpected smile and the whole day can turn around.

‘I felt like the universe was falling into place for me’

One miserable evening, a wonderful friend (👋) was dumped by her now-verifiably-silly boyfriend.

My friend was devastated.

We sat together on my sofa as she cried on my increasingly soggy shoulder, but nothing would console her: neither sympathy nor indignation — not even chamomile tea.

But the next day, with hope in her eyes, she told me how she’d been on the tube, still desolate with her agony, when the man sitting across from her gave her a smile.

‘I felt like the universe was falling into place for me,’ she said, ‘That it was supporting me, right at the moment when I most needed it.’

Smiles are powerful, healing magic spells that we’ve all got, stacked up, waiting, ready to go, inside of us.

Infinitely renewable, sometimes they’re tapping on our teeth, bursting to get out, other times they’re lurking deep down somewhere next to our kidneys and it takes all our pushing to birth them into the world.

But please don’t let them fester from underuse — they’ll only grow mouldy down there and you might end up with some kind of infection.

It’s imperative we use them, throw them out with careless abandon, because none of us can ever know who will need our smile-of-the-moment most desperately.

You — little old you with the creaky knees and the occasional patch of eczema — you could be the nudge that makes the nigh-infinite universe fall into place.

A little jolt to the heart

One random Tuesday, I was smiling at people on the escalator, as they came up and I went down. Most stared dully back, or snapped their glance away like frightened marmots, but one woman smiled back and I felt an instant shot of pleasure.

I bounced off the end of the escalator, beaming: smiles beget smiles.

It wasn’t much, this little jolt to the heart, but it was something: I felt seen and acknowledged by another member of the human race and it felt very good.

These moments didn’t happen every time I won a smile, but they happened often enough and, without buying a ticket, you can never win.

If we fill our days with these moments, and recognise that by doing so we are also filling other people’s days with such micro jolts, then perhaps we can spread the revolutionary idea that life is, despite everything, at least occasionally worth living — not because everything is rosy and all our problems are solved, but because someone else, a stranger, is there with us, on our side.

It’s a Team Human thing.

How quickly can we change the culture of an entire city?

After a couple of weeks of smiling my head off, I decide to ramp things up. I start saying good morning to random people on the street.

The pleasure I feel, that jolt when another person responds in kind, intensifies.

Instead of turning inwards when the day starts badly, I turn outwards with a smile and a cheery, ‘Good morning!’

I become insufferable.

But I don’t care: it works. A greeting is even harder to dodge than a smile and my spreadsheet numbers jump up again. The positivity of connection electrifies and energises me for longer. I live for this shit now.

It doesn’t matter at all to me that the other people are strangers. In fact it seems to help: the smile or greeting is completely without precedent, free of social obligation, a completely unearned and unaccounted gesture of goodwill, no strings attached.

No strings, perhaps, but every smile puts out a slender filament, like the exploratory hyphal tip of an underground mycelial network.

A smile, you see, is contagious. A smile, even from a stranger, can override the control we have on our facial muscles: we simply can’t stop ourselves from smiling back.

So when someone makes me smile, I carry that smile along with me for a while, until it bursts out from me to someone else. And so it is that the levity of a smile travels from host to host through my neighbourhood to who-knows-where beyond.

A smile at a stranger communicates that you are not afraid, that you know they are friend not foe. It communicates to them that their community is around them and that their neighbourhood is relaxed, content and ready to support.

This sense makes me wonder about how quickly we could change the culture of an entire city.

Be more Egyptian

I’ve been lucky enough to spend a good chunk of time in a few different countries, with very different cultural norms when it comes to interacting with strangers.

Two stand out in my mind: Egypt and Andalucía, Spain.

In Egypt, it is considered rude not to personally greet everyone when you enter a room, whether you know them or not. Try that next time you go down The Red Lion.

Those Arabic greetings are also much more meaningful than their desultory English equivalents (‘Alright’, ‘Hi’, ‘Morning’).

The polite greeting in Egypt translates as ‘Peace be upon you’, which is lovely, but pales beside the standard morning greeting, which comes as a call-and-response:

‘Morning of Goodness!’ you say.

‘Morning of Light!’ I reply, or perhaps ‘Morning of Flowers!’

It’s really rather pretty, when you think about it.

In Andalucía, I found that it’s customary to greet people as you sit down next to them on the bus. Public transport becomes an everyday opportunity for a good natter, whether they’re a stranger, a neighbour or that bloke you’ve seen about town who wears the hats — you know the one.

I returned from both trips a more polite, more gregarious citizen and I wondered: why is London not like this?

Even in Cairo, a city two or three times the size of London and infinitely more polluted, chaotic and stressful, people still greet each other as they cram onto or dangle off the side of the microbuses that weave in and out of thick traffic.

In London we keep ourselves to ourselves, and even folks from Andalucía know to keep their traps shut on the Underground.

A culture, evidently, dictates certain actions to its citizens, so that they ‘fit in’. These actions become habits: walk fast, head down, elbows tucked.

Whenever the possibility for human interaction becomes a real and present danger, hide your eyes behind your phone or, in extremis, behind a copy of the free newspapers that the authorities hand out on the street for that exact purpose.

These habits engrain themselves into our character, whether we want them to or not. We become avatars of the keep-yourself-to-yourself culture, and in so doing we help pull outsiders into alignment.

Changing a culture means changing the habits of its citizens, which starts with changing their actions: hard to do against the pull of the tide.

Recommended Daily Allowance

After a few weeks of counting smiles, I can pin point exactly how many I need per day to feel good about myself: twenty.

Less than twenty and I can feel a little grouchy and listless at the end of the day.

I can handle more than twenty, but a lot more can feel overwhelming. And no wonder: according to reports of a study funded by Hewlett Packard, a good smile (the highest scoring was Robbie Williams’s) can be as stimulating as two thousand bars of chocolate or £16,000 in cash.

Quality smiles can reduce the negative effects of stress, as measured by heart rate and cortisol, while increasing mood-enhancing hormones like serotonin and possibly reducing blood pressure.

Your smile can also determine how fulfilling and long-lasting your marriage will be (ahem, science) or even dictate how long you’ll live (according to one contested study that failed replication, but let’s not allow that to bother us too much).

Even if these scientific studies stretch and break the limits of their validity, wouldn’t you still rather live in a world where the wildest extrapolations of the power of smiles hold true?

For a month in 2013, I was there, in that world.

And, whenever I remember to do this thing that I forget I do, I’m back: in the forgotten world behind the rain and the umbrellas and the washed-out faces, behind the make-up and the masks.

The only thing we need to access this world, anytime, is the secret password. No one can change the password because the password is the same the world over — a smile.

~

Thanks to RK (👋) for hosting me in Chamonix and for joining me in lunatic connection with strangers. Thanks to CW (👋) and the whole MMT team who inspired the germ of this story — and thanks to my 2013 self (👋) for writing most of it a decade ago!

Today’s story is little more than the smashing together of two fancy words that I learned recently.

(And, actually, one of them I made up.)

Antischismogenesis

Schismogenesis is the word for a process where apparently close neighbours somehow end up defining themselves in direct opposition to the other.

Protestant and Catholic, Conservative and Labour, Mods and Rockers, Reds and Blues: despite sharing so much, we lurrrrve to amplify our divisions and differences.

In Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me), social psychologists Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson show how tenaciously we tend to cling onto our sides of the argument (or indeed angle on reality), no matter what evidence or alternative is put before us.

As the editors at Wikipedia succinctly summarise:

It describes a positive feedback loop of action and self-deception by which slight differences between people’s attitudes become polarised.

Fuelled by cognitive dissonance and the confirmation bias, that’s (at least one element of) schismogenesis in action.

Antischismogenesis is my made up word for the reverse process: a divided people finding — and building upon — common ground.

(Or at least the ability to notice where difference exists and retain the openness of mind to continue to listen.)

While antischismogenesis does happen naturally — chuck a couple of reasonably open-minded, relaxed humans together and it’s surprising what common ground they’ll find. What, you love pizza too?! — it can seem that schismogenesis is the weightier force, particularly insidious as (for most if not all people) it rarely happens with malice aforethought.

What we need is a concept that will guide us towards, not malice, but benevolence aforethought…

Equifinality

Equifinality is the fancy word for ‘there’s more than one way to skin a cat’ (or, indeed, that gruesome idiom’s even more graphic progenitor: ‘there are more ways of killing a cat than choking it with cream’).

Equifinality is almost a state of mind.

There so are many different ways of ending up with similar-looking results that it’d be INSANE to judge anyone because they aren’t doing it exactly like you or because they don’t look like you or talk like you or even think like you.

Sometimes you’ve got to let them do it their way.

In fact, you could say that the spirit of equifinality is exactly what we need to find in order to rebuild our communities through antischismogenesis.

What we need is a mouthful: antischismogenetic equifinality.

Go on, give it a try — if nothing else, it’s fun to wrap your tongue around.

How we actually do antischismogenetic equifinality is another matter entirely.

The Discerning Traveller’s Comprehensively Empty Guide To Antischismogenetic Equifinality (On A Shoestring)

As it’s a concept that I just made up, there is no behavioural toolkit for antischismogenetic equifinality, but I bet it’d include all the usual tricks of the communication trade:

• Learn about the ordinary human tendency for schismogenesis between in-groups and out-groups. Done ✔️
• Notice where schismogenesis has nurtured division in your own life. What kind of people are in your circle of friends, colleagues and nodding acquaintances?
• Notice when you are actively manufacturing division from others. Don’t forget that division isn’t all blazing rows and fisty-cuffs. It’s most often as mundane and insidious as silent prejudice.
• What’s your internal monologue when you pass a member of the out-group in the street? How about when you hear your favourite worst enemy on the radio or read about their latest egregious behaviour in the news? If you’re anything like me, you’ll despatch with relish the three Ds: dismiss, deny and denigrate.
• Learn about and notice your own susceptibility to the cognitive biases that make us all think that we’re not only the best, but also sparkling exceptions to any and every rule. Cognitive biases, our mental blind spots, are like a baseball bat to the knees of equifinality.
• Interrupt the opening of any division with extra-ordinary behaviours, which usually begins with you reaching out in a spirit of curiosity. Nonjudgemental curiosity is the practical precursor of equifinality.
• Ask open questions (instead of leading questions), listen for what others want to communicate (instead of what you want to hear) and check that you have understood others as they want to be understood (instead of how you’d like to label them).
• Employ random acts of kindness to set spinning a virtuous cycle of connection between strangers.

But I bet you’ve got a million other ideas and I’m totally here for them. Hit the comments.

~

The author would particularly like to thank Davids Graeber and Wengrow and, as ever, the editors at Wikipedia.

Thanks to everyone who shared and messaged about last week’s story, The End Of Doomspreading — it’s already my sixth most-read edition of this newsletter.

My drive is to help us develop more effective ways of connecting with people who start on the other side of an apparently deep divide and turn difficult conversations into connective conversations — like the one I had in the sauna yesterday.

One of the regulars had asked me about Thighs of Steel and so I was telling them a bit about what we do in solidarity with people on the move.

From the other side of the bench, another man piped up: ‘I don’t think you’ll get many people who disagree with immigration in theory,’ he said, ‘at least, not for people who are here to work hard and contribute to the economy.

‘But why does the government spend seven million pounds a day putting asylum seekers with no qualifications and no job in four and five star hotels — and giving them a phone, phone credit and fifty quid a week pocket money, to boot?’

A previous iteration of David Charles would have felt threatened by this man’s speech.

A previous iteration would have seen this fellow sauna dweller as an enemy to be fought and defeated. A previous iteration might have fired back what this man had missed: the cold realities of living in the UK as an asylum seeker.

Alternatively, a previous iteration might have felt angry, so angry that I might have spent the rest of my sauna time simmering in outrage, completely incapable of forming a coherent response until much later. We’ve all been there.

But yesterday, I was curious.

I could tell that the man was doomspreading and doomsplaining: not only passing on ‘the world’s all going to shit’ propaganda that he’d swallowed, but also pushing his pessimistic moral opinion that there are deserving and undeserving human beings.

Because I recognised that he was doomspeaking, I knew that this man needed empathy, not argument.

So I listened for the underlying fears and emotions. What I heard was confused resentment, fuelled by a deep sense of injustice.

I also hate injustice so it was easy to empathise, not with the content of what he was saying, but with his emotion of confused resentment and his unmet need for justice.

Although we only had a few minutes before I fainted from heat exhaustion, we quickly found some common ground.

‘If they’ve got all this money lying around for five star hotels,’ the man said, ‘why don’t they look after the people who are already here, instead of giving it to people who just arrived?

‘Why don’t they use it to end homelessness?’

Zing! Why not, indeed?

From our opening statements, this man and I were apparently entrenched on opposite precipices of a gas-powered flaming canyon, where even a single step towards each other would get us burned alive.

But now I can see how easily we could work together on something we both believe in.

Even if we radically disagree on freedom of movement (at one point he suggested that the government should’ve bought up all the decommissioned cruise liners to keep refugees offshore), he urgently wants to end homelessness.

I can get with that, so that’s where we can start.

(I won’t mention quite yet that close to half of rough sleepers in London are not from the UK and that our asylum system and destitution are not as independent as he might imagine.)

Funnily enough, Dan Sumption (of pithy newsletter fame) told me he had an almost identical conversation about migration this week as well.

I hope you’re also having these conversations and I hope that the idea of doomspeech helps you make such connections about more than argument and antagonism.

Conspiracy

A couple of weeks ago, I met a young man who lived in a world of confusion, threat and mistrust.

Within a couple of minutes of meeting, he was telling me that he felt like straight men ‘like us’ were on the bottom rung of society’s ladder.

He followed this up with a story about the deliberate derailment by the US government of a train carrying nuclear waste, an act of state-sponsored vandalism that would create a Chernobyl-like exclusion zone across Ohio.

‘You can look it up anywhere,’ he said. (So I did.)

He was in despair at the state of the world, at how big business and governments are conspiring to wreck the planet, and he explained his plan to raise enough money to buy some land in the country where he could build his own community from scratch, a safe haven for those like him who had ‘woken up’ over the past couple of years.

Before you misunderstand me, this is not an eye-rolling-at-bonkers-conspiracy-theorists moment.

Please believe me when I say that this person had very good reasons to see the world the way they do.

And, while I don’t necessarily share his view of current events, I sympathise deeply with the underlying emotions of confusion, threat, mistrust, fragility and despair and with his urge to escape to a utopian community where everything is perfect.

We Need New Words For This

We all know what manspreading and mansplaining are, right?

Manspreading: Typically of a man: to take up more than their fair share of space, either physically or metaphorically in conversation, etc..

Mansplaining: Typically of a man: to explain (something) needlessly, overbearingly, or condescendingly, especially (typically when addressing a woman) in a manner thought to reveal a patronising or chauvinistic attitude.

Love em or hate em, neologisms identify stuff in the world and the best of these new words can also facilitate change.

Since being able to name and frame the behaviour, I have become more aware of my own tendency to take up space. Sometimes I shut up or pull my legs in a bit.

(Incidentally, the man- prefix isn’t such a neologism as you might imagine. Manswearing — to be guilty of perjury or oath-breaking — goes back a thousand years. I love that.)

Credit to whoever came up with these man- neologisms and I hope they don’t mind me appropriating the -splaining and -spreading pattern for my own purposes.

But first: who here has heard of doomscrolling?

(When I ask this question in the real world, people older than me tend to look puzzled; people younger than me roll their eyes: like, obviously.)

Doomscrolling

Doomscrolling is what you call staring at your phone or computer, completely incapable of dragging yourself away from the endless carousel of negative news gunge.

And what happens when we do finally tear ourselves away from our phones and re-engage with the world?

A severe case of what computer programmers, statisticians and dieticians call GIGO: ‘Garbage in, garbage out’.

Who better to tell us about the impact of bad news on our psyche than the world’s oldest and largest broadcaster, the BBC:

It turns out that news coverage is far more than a benign source of facts. From our attitudes to immigrants to the content of our dreams, it can sneak into our subconscious and meddle with our lives in surprising ways.

It can lead us to miscalculate certain risks, shape our views of foreign countries, and possibly influence the health of entire economies. It can increase our risk of developing post-traumatic stress, anxiety and depression.

Now there’s emerging evidence that the emotional fallout of news coverage can even affect our physical health — increasing our chances of having a heart attack or developing health problems years later.

But bad news isn’t all bad.

Despair And Paranoia

There is no stronger spur to action than the sense that something is deeply wrong with our lives: we’d better fix this now or else.

It’s why humans have a strong bias to pay more attention when things are going badly.

And I’m grateful that we have this bias towards negativity: as I’ve written before, nothing gets shit done like anxiety.

But it is, and should remain, an acute pain reflex.

When that reflex is combined with the chronic negativity of a planet’s worth of bad news gunge, the only reasonable responses, once we’re saturated and burnt out, are crippling despair or reductive paranoia.

Despair is pretty much the only appropriate response if your brain takes a stab at fully understanding and empathising with the depth of misery generated by more than a day’s worth of headlines.

It cripples our belief in our strength to make meaningful change and our drive to leave the world a better place as we depart than when we arrived. In our despair, we retreat, disconnect and close the door to strangers, even friends.

Paranoia solves for despair by reducing the overwhelming complexity of human existence to an easily comprehensible, if false, explanation.

We’re controlled by a cabal of Satan-worshipping elites who run a child sex ring and there’s nothing we can do but escape into a fantasy world with our dwindling allies.

Despair and paranoia are two extremes of rational response to overwhelming complexity and I’m sure you’ll recognise yourself at some point on that miserable line.

Doomspreading And Doomsplaining

That’s why I believe we need new words to swiftly identify — and interrupt — the disempowering, alienating discourse that happens when doomscrolling, whether our own or others’, bleeds into our ways of being, our actions and our conversations.

The aim is to strengthen our belief that we can influence events, make meaningful change and grow a better life for all beings.

So may I introduce to you two new words:

Doomspreading: to dominate a conversation with the perspective that everything is going to shit.

Doomsplaining: to explain how everything is going to shit, especially in response to the alternate perspective that things are kind of going okay.

I told a friend (👋) about the concept on Monday and was thrilled to get this message from her on Wednesday:

I think we need this.

We need to be able to notice what’s happening when it’s happening and we need to be able to step in and stop the drift towards despair and paranoia at source.

Somehow, we need to find a way of throwing ourselves a lifeline to a better world.

Stopping The Doomspread

With Others

The way we stop the spread is not to engage or challenge and certainly not to block the superficial content of doom, but instead to hear and empathise with the underlying emotions.

The chap I met at the start of the story was upset because he felt like he wasn’t being heard, that he was being lied to by government, and that businesses he couldn’t control were destroying the planet. All he wanted was the security of his own home and the warmth of an understanding community.

Goddam, I hear that!

Once I’d heard that, this man, this ‘tin foil hat’ (his words) conspiracy theorist, was ready to hear how I see the world.

We parted, each trusting the world a little more.

Ironically, by expressing his beliefs to someone who didn’t believe them, this man’s desire for an understanding community became possible without going through the hassle of setting up a countryside hermitage.

With Ourselves

Remember that this method applies as much if not more to ourselves as to others.

If you find yourself doomspreading, pause, and see if you can dig down below the ‘facts’ and instead express your underlying concerns and your unspoken needs.

What do you really need from this interaction? Reassurance? Understanding? Safety? Fairness? Honesty? Choice? Acceptance? Friendship? Help?

This expression of need will be so much more relatable than your rant about Prince Harry and so much more likely to lead directly to a solution that you can actually act on.

The world is complicated. I have so much empathy for people who find it too much — I do too sometimes.

But, as much as we’d love to, we can’t ever fully control; we can only fully collaborate.

The wonderful thing is that, through collaboration, we build trust and this trust creates resiliant and loving communities.

Resiliant and loving communities solve their own problems and, suddenly, our lonely despair and paranoia is replaced with cooperative strength and courage.

So let’s all start by calling out doomspreading: it doesn’t help.

This conceited question demands a few boundaries. And, within those boundaries, I think the straightforward answer to this question is yes.

But that’s not the same as the boundless, infinite answer to this question. Which we’ll get onto once I’ve finished stroking my ego.

First, let’s all say a big hello-how-are-you to David Charles:

“David Charles” On The Google Front Page

The world’s biggest creepy crawler (that’s actually quite a clever search engine joke, if you please) seems a reasonable place to start when judging notability in the Internet age.

I searched in private mode and logged out of my Google account, which hopefully mitigated at least some of the bias towards my own search history. (More on that anon, however.)

Once you’ve stripped out the Google Maps and Images results, there are only six pure “David Charles” Google Search results on the front page.

1. David Charles Residential Sales and Lettings

You’d hope that there is or was a David Charles involved at some point, somewhere, but I’m discounting them because there is no David Charles on their Meet The Team page.

As there isn’t even anyone with the first initial D, nor the second initial C, I fear that they are only trading on our good name. Vampires unworthy of top spot.

2. David Charles Property Consultants

Seemingly totally unrelated to the residential sales and lettings company, but, again: no sign of anyone actually called David Charles. Founded in 1994 by Peter Amstell.

Given that they’re trading under davidcharles.co.uk, I’m furious.

3. David Charles Childrenswear

With a head office on Seven Sisters Road, this ‘Iconic British Brand for Luxury Designer Girl’s Dresses’ now has boutiques in Shanghai, Suzhou and St Petersburg.

At least they’re older than me: founded in 1970… by husband and wife team David and Susan Graff. My blood boils.

4. David Charles, Me

Give the first three results, I’m now wondering whether I should double check my birth certificate doesn’t expose my true name, Danglebert Thumpernickel.

5. David Charles, Welsh TV actor

The bastard that snagged davidcharles.biz before I could.

David Charles’s IMDB profile informs us that he has appeared in shows such as Grange Hill, The Bill, Doc Martin, The Crown and something called High Hopes, in which, pleasingly, he played Prince Charles.

Legitimate David Charles? Hard to say for sure because actors union Equity demand uniqueness in name.

I’ve given David Charles the benefit of the doubt because he is Welsh and Charles is a stoutly Welsh surname (although as many as 1 in 28 Grenadians are Charleses).

6. David Charles, Professor of Philosophy and Classics at Yale University

No doubt a notable fan of Aristotle, but, seriously, who’s looking this far down the list?

There was a brief summer where both David Charles and I were engaged at Oxford University: he as professor and I as messenger boy. No wonder he felt like he had to move abroad to make a name for himself.

Among The Weeds

That’s it for the first page on Google, but I can’t help myself diving deeper:

• David Charles, psychic who does Youtube readings for the Royal Family and ‘red hot lucky lottery numbers’
• David Charles, legal counsel at McKenna & Associates, Pittsburgh
• David Charles, Account Executive at Alan Boswell Group, an insurance brokers
• David Charles, Head of Risk and Compliance at Calibrate Partners, a wealth management hedge fund
• David Charles, Teaching Assistant Professor at EdD, Organizational Change and Leadership, University of Southern California
• David Charles, teacher at the University of Havre Normandie with an interest in nineteenth century French literature

And deeper:

• David Charles, an internist at a clinic in Rockville, Maryland
• David Charles, solicitor at Darby & Darby in Torquay
• David Charles, Principal Engineer at Kingfisher IT Services in Olney
• David Charles, cofounder / CEO of The Strive Initiative, Pasadena
• David Charles, Client & Market Development Manager at Clifford Chance, Frankfurt
• David Charles, psychologist in Louisville, Kentucky

And — pass the oxygen — deeper:

• David Charles, a farm vet in Derby
• David Charles, Programme Director at the Disclosure and Barring Service (I regularly update my DBS certificate — has my paperwork ever crossed his desk?)
• David Charles, Head of Climate Action at University of Strathclyde (congratulations on recently handing in your PhD, sir!)
• David Charles, Partner at Bickerdike Allen Partners LLP, an architecture and planning company in London
• David Charles, an accountant in Glasgow
• David Charles of David Charles Ministries, producer of hits like Standout Christian, Thank You Father and God Sent Riddim, with as many as 30 monthly listeners on Spotify

Okay, too deep now.

Or, wait — not deep enough — the CEO and Founder of David Charles Ministries is none other than David Burkley.

What the actual hell? Can everyone just keep their hands off our name, please?

Wikipedia

Spitting feathers at the gamesmanship of these masquerading charlatans, I turn my attentions to that bastion of knowledge, Wikipedia, an encyclopaedia with a redoubtable test of notability embedded in its editorial code.

People are presumed notable if they have received significant coverage in multiple published secondary sources that are reliable, intellectually independent of each other, and independent of the subject.

Selecting only the David Charleses who are (probably) still alive, what do we find here?

David Atiba Charles

Retired professional footballer from Trinidad, who was part of the Trinidad & Tobago World Cup squad in 2006. He didn’t get any playing time, but, to be fair, nor did I.

It’s harsh, but I’m ruling him out on the grounds that the ‘Atiba’ seems to be a foundational element of his name.

David Charles and David Charles

Both Australian, the first a retired politician, the other a retired senior civil servant.

Yes! From 13 March 1985 to 19 February 1990 there were not one, but TWO David Charleses serving in the Australian government. I am in awe.

David Charles

Professor and Vice-Chair of Neurology and Medical Director at Vanderbilt Telehealth, Tennessee.

But — controversy ho! — yet another David Charles imposter.

As you can see from Charles’ latest paper (BDNF rs6265 Genotype Influences Outcomes of Pharmacotherapy and Subthalamic Nucleus Deep Brain Stimulation in Early-Stage Parkinson’s Disease), his first initial is actually ‘P’.

David Charles

British drummer, recording engineer and record producer, most notably for The Charlatans 1997 album Tellin’ Stories. Last active: unknown.

So, in summary: there are six notable and living David Charleses recorded on Wikipedia. Two of them aren’t bone fide David Charleses and another three are, by all accounts, long retired.

The only one who stands is David Charles, our favourite professor of philosophy, who, famously, languishes not one but two places below me in the Google rankings.

The Search Concludes

And I’m afraid that this is where we must call a halt to our search.

Yes, I could plough on through the 48 David Charleses on IMDB. But only two of them are notable enough to have pictures and both are spurious: David Leach (AKA ‘David Charles’) and David Charles Rodrigues.

Yes, I could investigate the ten David Charleses listed on Discog, the music database, and I could sign up to Facebook or LinkedIn and continue my trawling there, but I think we have enough data, don’t you?

And I’m sure you’ll agree with my conclusion: yes, I am indeed the most notable David Charles in the universe.

But you knew that already. That’s not what’s interesting.

What’s Interesting?

Shamefully, I’ve spent hours this week trawling through dozens of internet biographies of other people called David Charles and what I’ve found is that we’re all, in some way, notable.

Who am I to argue the superiority of my name against the achievements and efforts of the Principal Engineer at Kingfisher IT Services? The Principal Engineer, for pity’s sake —

An enthusiastic and expert Technical Leader with an impressive track record of design and delivery of innovative and robust solutions to demanding business and technical challenges.

No, I don’t know what any of that means either, but it tells me that notability is in the eye of the beholder, certainly to ourselves, but also to loved ones, students, teammates, psychic clients and both human and veterinary patients.

Utterly Irrelevant / Utterly Essential

This search has simultaneously made me feel utterly irrelevant and utterly essential.

David Charlesing is a team game and we are all making our contribution, each in its own way notable.

That is our goal, if we needed one, and, if we needed an exemplar, then who better than David Charles of Somerset, former President of The British Beekeepers Association?

In this interview for BeeCraft Magazine, David Charles talks about how he used to take his bees to graze on the heather on Exmoor.

The interviewer points out that taking your bees to heather is a risky business because you never know whether it’s going to be a good harvest or not.

Quite apart from the high probability of bad weather on the moor, if the bees get distracted away from the delicious heather pollen, then that’s it for your honey.

David Charles’s reply is almost spiritual:

There’s always a profit, even if it’s not in honey. […] You’re releasing your bees at half past six in the morning: that’s the time you see deer walking along the ridge.

When you go to collect them on the way back, there’s a full moon and the deer are walking along that ridge again, silhouetted against the night sky.

That’s all part of the harvest from taking your bees to the heather.

All Part Of The Harvest

This David Charles died in 2020, aged 85 and a half.

Phil McAnespie of the Scottish Beekeepers Association was among the tributes:

I only got to know and speak with David on a small number of occasions, in particular at the National Honey Show, and at all times found him to be a warm and friendly person, who would put himself out to assist you in any way he could.

All David Charleses, we all play our part.

Some of us look after bees. Some don’t.

Some of us will spend our lives with you. Some of us you’ll only get to know and speak with on a small number of occasions.

But however a David Charles comes into your life, that’s still notable, both for you and for us.

That’s all part of the harvest.

~
The kicker, of course, is that, despite my lofty appearance on Google, I don’t appear anywhere at all on the search engine I personally use, DuckDuckGo.

It simply doesn’t matter.

(And, yes, I am an admirer of Dave Gorman. I’m not him.)

1. Definitions

I opened last week’s email with the grim origin story of what I call my ‘yoga’ habit.

I’ve never been under any illusion that what I’m doing is proper yoga, but a table tennis talk with a friend (and reader 👋) has put my misuse of the term to bed.

This is the dictionary definition of yoga that I have to hand:

Discipline aimed at training the consciousness for a state of perfect spiritual insight and tranquility that is achieved through the three paths of actions and knowledge and devotion.

Even by that cursory definition, eight minutes of stretches before bed while listening to an audiobook is not yoga — no, not even if that audiobook is Marcel Proust.

Calling what I do ‘yoga’ is like an American coming over to a village green in Oxfordshire and calling what they do with the wickets, whites and willow ‘baseball’.

My friend recommended I watch this short video by Blair Imani about yoga and cultural appropriation:

See more

And, to be honest, I’m not bothered about learning the deep roots of yoga — I’m sure it’s a worthwhile world of study, but it’s not why I’m here.

I’m here to improve my flexibility to the point where I can poo comfortably in the wild. In other words (literally): I’m here to stretch.

Yes, I got a lot of my stretch moves from what were called yoga books, classes or videos, but, if I’m honest, my main justification for using the term is because it’s a short word that fits into a narrow spreadsheet column.

So I’ll add five characters and call it by its name: stretching.

1a. The English Language And Cultural Appropriation

This is not going to turn into a story about cultural appropriation, but it’s worth noting that the English language holds a special place in global culture.

This comes with an astonishing array of benefits for native speakers, but also a few things that we need to look out for.

To stick with the cricket example, imagine if Indian cricketers adopted new rules that meant you got eight points for a six (but it was still called a six for reasons that everyone else has forgotten), you had to hit the ball with a hammer and there was no afternoon tea break. 😱

The England and Wales Cricket Board would be appalled — cricket is our sport, first played on our lawns over five hundred years ago, with the first laws of the game written down by our Grace the Duke of Richmond and the Second Viscount Midleton for two matches played in Surrey and Sussex in July 1727.

I mean — how much more English can you get?

But there are more than 100 million cricketers in India, compared to only 229,100 in England. People from the Indian subcontinent, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, make up 90 percent of the world’s billion cricket fans.

It wouldn’t matter how many cute videos the ECB posted about cultural appropriation: whatever India calls cricket, well, that’s basically what everyone else is going to have to call cricket.

And what India is to world cricket, English is to world language.

2. You Don’t Need Anything But Your Body To Stretch

A few people picked up on my stretching anecdote and asked me for suggestions of videos they could follow along with at home.

But I couldn’t be particularly helpful because the follow along approach never worked for me, not books, not apps, not videos and not even in-person classes.

Stretching this way always ended up feeling like a chore, being asked to do things that my body couldn’t do, with no support into poses that could hurt me.

It was far too easy to feel like a failure.

Stretching only clicked into place for me when:

1. I realised that one minute of stretching was better than none.
2. I made it a permanent home in my bedtime routine, usually while listening to something — dribbling through Proust in this way was a transporting delight.

In the first seven months, I missed only three days.

I’ve never had a habit that solid before and the success came from having rock bottom expectations (one minute, that’s all) combined with something I already enjoyed (modernist French literature!)

You simply don’t get that level of kindness, generosity and forgiveness from a follow-along video.

If you don’t know any stretching moves, then my suggestion is:

1. Follow how your body wants to move.
2. Flick through a book in the library for ten minutes. You’ll get the idea.

Having said all that, a friend (and reader 👋) recently recommended Do Yoga With Me. I haven’t used it, but I’m sure it’s great.

Before the 1 minute thing landed, I used an app called Down Dog, which puts together a customisable playlist of videos for you. It didn’t stick as a habit, but it did teach me some cool moves.

A warm welcome from a squatted perch overlooking the ocean.

Following on from last week’s appeal for healthy habitual alternatives to any form of knee-based self-care, I have started using a squatting desk.

Inspired by a 2017 article by physical therapist Carrie Williamson, this is an almost certainly marketable term for ‘swapping my chair for an upturned kettlebell’.

Since December 2019, I have recorded 772 at-home yoga sessions, at an average of 16 minutes per day (currently more like 8 minutes).

I’ve been amazed at what a difference this investment of 1 percent of my waking time has made to my flexibility.

The fact that I can get into the Asian squat position is a minor miracle considering that, three years ago, I couldn’t sit cross-legged on the floor.

But there is a gross story about why I started stretching on the daily — you want to hear it?

Thought so.

In summer 2019, I cycled with Thighs of Steel from Paris to Bordeaux and then from Ljubljana to Athens.

Every night for four weeks, we’d wild camp — along with everything that entails.

Sleeping under a scrap of canvas, washing in rivers or lakes, eating high-carb meals under the stars as the sun set and dawn rose.

And, of course, pooing into a freshly dug hole in the ground.

This isn’t where the story gets gross.

At first, the pooing was fine.

My flexibility wasn’t up to much, so I wasn’t able to position myself over my poo hole very comfortably, but that didn’t seem to matter so long as I dug the pit near a tree against which I could balance myself.

But then all that high-carb food caught up with me and I got a touch of constipation.

Constipation is uncomfortable enough, but, with a relaxing toilet seat unavailable and physically unable to squat, I found myself straining harder than I usually might.

And this is where the story gets gross.

One morning, after porridge at a beautiful riverside camp spot in Croatia, I strained so hard that I slightly tore my anus.

Ouch.

The discomfort stayed with me for the rest of the ride — and I can tell you that one thing you really don’t want while cycling for ten hours a day is even a slightly torn anus.

When I got home to the UK, I vowed that I would do something about my inability to defecate comfortably without a throne.

So began my daily yoga sessions — and now look at me. Not only can I take wildly adventurous poos, but I can even write gross stories to you while crouching in a kettlebell-supported squat.

Start from where you are, and start today.

The big reason I keep going back to sauna is stories.

Conversations with a revolving cast of regulars and passing trade always make me think or feel something.

Sometimes I think those conversations are worth writing down and sharing.

So here you go: four short stories from sweating it out with strangers.

#1: Put Your Money On Humanity

The other day I had a meeting with my investment managers —

Wow, what an opener. That’s sauna life for you.

— and I asked them, where can I put my money so it’s safe?

And they said nowhere.

Isn’t that remarkable? There is nowhere that the professionals can say will be 100 percent safe for your money right now.

Even gold, they said, even gold.

Sorry for the depressing conversation —

No, no, it’s fine —

This is me speaking now because I’m actually finding it a reassuring conversation.

This man is learning the truth that money can’t actually do anything for you. Only humans can.

And machines built by machines built by humans.

But mainly humans.

Maybe, instead of finding somewhere for his investments to live happily ever after, this man should put all his money on humanity, the stewards of the land, community, the carers and growers, and society, the builders, dreamers and changers.

In the future, we might not have money, but we’ll certainly have each other.

#2: Socialist Rather Than Progressive

I met a man in his fifties, I’d guess, who was anxious, scared and angry, all because of what he’d seen on TV.

What’s happening in Afghanistan, in Iran and in China, he told me. Terrible, terrible things.

When I pointed out that there wasn’t much he could do about that, he replied: You’re right. It’s no better here with the clowns we’ve got in charge.

You know, a few years ago I watched that Plantagenets programme — and nothing changes. It’s the same today, right? The rich get everything and the working classes get nothing — we’re serfs to them, that’s all. Serfs.

When I suggested that this world view might have been influenced by the same bad news he caught from TV and that some things might have changed a bit, he said: I’m with you, but I need more convincing.

The idea that things haven’t changed since the death of Richard III in 1485 strikes me as a little defeatist and surely more likely to result in things not changing, even if we would dearly love them to.

In the past 537 years, we have at least in the UK built a society where education and healthcare is free to all, without financial, ethnic, gender or class barrier.

If nothing changes, then why are so many people fighting so hard to keep it that way?

#3: You Only Live Once

You Only Live Once was his mantra. On his lips and, tattooed, on his shoulders.

He worked in fintech and talked about the price of gold and the US dollar. (Bearish.)

His plan, not this year, but next, was to fly to Cape Town and, from there, five or six hours by plane to Antarctica, with another two internal flights to tour the white continent.

It’s not cheap, but it’s a once in a lifetime trip, isn’t it? Four days with only fourteen other people on board.

He hates being around other people, you see.

He hated Prague. He had to get up at 6am to walk across the Charles Bridge because of The Masses.

He believes in working first and going away after. He only wants one or two weeks a month for Euro breaks. Then one longer trip at the end of the year, when he’d earned it, you know.

Before Christmas, he did the German Christmas markets. He flew Lufthansa on two legs of the trip, from Berlin to Munich and from Munich to Prague. (Which he hated.)

At this point, our investor from the first story asks, mildly: Do you ever consider trains for these short hops when you’re in Europe?

Sorry?

He only lived once, you see.

#4: Changing Lanes

He introduced himself as an HGV driver from Ewelme.

His daughter stayed on the lower shelf. His wife stayed in the hot tub. His son stayed quiet.

He used to be a chippie — the woodworking sort not the fish frying sort — decades in the trade. Eventually, he quit. It was doing his head in.

He retrained as an HGV driver. A big gamble for a fifty-year-old with a young family. Big gamble.

But he didn’t take to the hours at the wheel, the days of asphalt-induced solitude. Too lonely. Misses shop talk.

Now he works a couple of days on the HGVs, but does a nice sideline as a skip driver and waste refuse operative.

They’re a proper team. He loves it.

And look at him now, five years later on New Year’s Day, staying with his young family in a spa hotel on the south coast.

If you’re unhappy, I suppose, you’re never too old to change lanes.

Happy 2023! Or, for those of you still on the Byzantine or Roman calendar, I hope you’re all having a great 7531!

My year started with dancing and Dancing Ledge, followed by an assault on a wardrobe, and then finally getting all the results back from my Zoe personalised nutrition experiment.

Data! — what a wonderful start to the year!

This Zoe experiment measured my blood sugar control, blood fat control and the contents of my guts. And, as a confirmed hypochondriac, the results are actually quite embarrassing.

What I was vaguely hoping for was some sort of blood or fecal explanation for my inherent recalcitrancy, soporific laziness, and, of course, those violent depressive episodes following any use of the letter ‘u’ in ‘sentences’ such as ‘what u up 2?’

Instead, I got this:

Excellent blood sugar control…

And very good blood fat control. Gutted.

Looks like I’ll have to come to terms with Prince-inspired lexical horrors alone.

But, hold ur horses — what’s this?

Yes! — I have a SHOCKING diversity of microbial species living in my gut!

No wonder I’m completely broken as a human being — frankly, it’s a miracle that I’m even able to sit here and type these wor— Oh, wait.

Apparently, Zoe have discovered that there’s actually a ‘more powerful’ measure of gut microbiome health than mere species diversity, one based on the ratio of ‘good’ to ‘bad’ bugs in my tumtum.

Let’s see…

Turns out that my constitution is bullet proof. How irritating.

Oh well. Let’s put that aside and look instead at what all this data might mean for my eating habits.

For data nerds (and, if you’ve got this far, that’s you), this is where the fun begins.

Zoe rolls all those delicious data points together, feeds them into an algorithm and spits out a score for every single imaginable foodstuff that you might put into your gaping maw (except, for some conspiratorial reason, strawberries).

These findings are not earth shattering — who knew that scoffing cake might be suboptimal for your diet? (But if you are going to scoff cakes, scoff these…)

Personalised nutrition is more about tweaking the little things, making subtle improvements through substitution or combination.

My personal takeaways (TAKEAWAYS) from this experiment thus far are:

• Eat kale, broccoli and peas every day — green stuff, basically (mind blown, eh?)
• Go mad on apples, oranges, avocados, passionfruit, cherries and grapefruit, but avoid dried fruit (except semi-dried prunes) and, while I’m in the fruit aisle, not much point in picking up bananas either (interesting)
• My protein is, predictably, going to come from lentils, beans and tempeh (basically beans) — mind you, I haven’t been (BEAN) eating much of this sort of thing and my daily nutritional intake (which Zoe also calculates) has been totally fine without it
• Swap out peanut butter for almond butter (that’s gonna get spenny) and balsamic vinegar for white wine vinegar
• Eat bulgar wheat or pearl barley instead of rice, pasta or potatoes (and if I have to eat potatoes, go for sweet potatoes)
• Add extra virgin olive oil, olives, hummus, nutritional yeast, kimchi and all kinds of seeds to everything (even the Welsh cakes)
• When eating carbs, make sure to combine them with fats

Let’s see food combinations in action as we build the arch-hipster uber-brunch, smashed avo on toast, starting with just plain toast on the left:

See how one tablespoon of EVOO transforms that slice of rye sourdough toast from a worrying score of 45 (‘enjoy in moderation’) to a handsome score of 75 (‘enjoy freely’).

Smash some avo on top and — BOOM — 86 points, which I think translates to ‘gorge horrifically’.

So that’s how the Zoe program works. I won’t keep going on about it in this newsletter because it is, by definition, personalised to me.

It is also extremely expensive — £450 in total for the testing and four months of working with the data (that’s what I’ve started this week) — and most of you have much better things to be doing with that kind of money.

But I hope this little tour has helped you ponder a little about what’s going on inside you (and perhaps only you) when you put things inside yourself.

If you’re interested in reading more, I wrote this science-y explanation of how I (possibly) transformed my gut microbiome by cutting out sugar for three months.

There are some predictable and unavoidable generalities — eat your greens daily, save your cake for special occasions — but your microbiome, like mine, is unique and will behave differently with everything you eat.

If you are interested in trying the Zoe program, then I have an invite code that will get you instant access (otherwise there’s a waiting list). Hit me back and I’ll send it over.

And, by all means, I’d be happy (possibly a bit too happy) to go into excruciating detail about anything else you’re curious about. Just wind me up and set me going.

I have one last question: anyone know how to make sourdough from gram flour?

ps: Oh, by the way, I am also extremely grateful to my little bugs for being so goldarned healthy. It makes me wonder what effect the past couple of years of more-or-less veganism have had on the little blighters. Doesn’t seem to have done much harm, anyway.

pps: I’m also thrilled to see my uncool attraction to Emmental backed up by the data. Number one, baby!

MIGRATION

1. The Nationality and Borders Act of 2022 was passed in April after the Commons rejected a series of amendments proposed by the Lords that would have protected compliance with the Refugee Convention. Heavy. In January, with the help of paradox, I tried to understand our part in all this, because we all have a part in the collective imagination of oppression. Resist.
2. The proportion of British people who think immigration is ‘bad for the economy’ halved from 42 per cent to 20 per cent. Despite all the frothy headlines over ‘culture wars’, social attitudes in the UK are becoming steadily more liberal. Perhaps a reason why crime in the UK is now at its lowest level since the 1980s.
3. 95 Thighs of Steel cyclists rode a cumulative 71,337km and climbed up 757,975 metres of elevation, the equivalent of more than 85 Everests. 781 bowls of porridge, 11kg of peanut butter and untold megatons of pastries filled the 2,341,500 calorie cycling deficit. Oh, and we raised £102,020 for grassroots refugee projects around Europe.
4. One of the projects we supported this year was Calais Migrant Solidarity, a No Borders activist group that I worked with when I first went to Calais in 2014. It’s remarkable that they’ve been a constant presence there, challenging the noisy narrative of our deadly border and organising with people on the move, since 2009.

It was great for us to be able to find such a wonderful funding organisation who would support our work without asking us to compromise our beliefs or messaging.

MINDS

5. Man Sloth Mode is a temporary ‘depressed’ (low energy, low affect, low arousal) state of being, usually triggered by specific environmental factors, to which men are particularly susceptible. Man Sloth Mode was my most widely read, shared and commented story of the year, so it was great to join a Men’s Circle in Bournemouth, full of people eager to take their place on earth.
6. In the UK, according to the government’s Gender Equality Monitor, women do 25.5 hours of unpaid work per week, while men manage only 16 hours — a gap that widens still further if we exclude transport. However, more egalitarian attitudes towards unpaid labour results in higher female sexual efficacy and more sex for everyone. C’mon now, guys.
7. I can’t write a list of 99 Problems. (Incidentally, nor can Jay-Z: there are only nine distinct problems in his famous rap.)
8. A huge amount, I’m sure, was lost during the TV editing process, but watching counsellor Orna Guralnik on Couples Therapy shows the significant weight that a therapist must bear in order to create space where a couple can work through their shit. (I hope what I learned makes up for the life I might have lost: on average, every hour of TV after age 25 reduces life expectancy by 21.8 minutes.)
9. I’m one of 27 percent of people who rarely or almost never think about what I might do five years or more from now. I tried to fix this with a floor plan. Not sure it worked, but it was fun. I also learned that setting SMART goals and seeking high levels of accountability might be doing me more harm than good. Better to set up — and then appreciate — life-enriching processes.
10. The course I took in Nonviolent Communication (NVC) opened my eyes to the power of identifying what needs I am expressing when I realise that I’m feeling (say) frustrated, excited or overwhelmed. More on this topic in 2023, but for now here’s a quote from the founder of NVC, Marshall Rosenberg:

When the sole energy that motivates us is simply to make life wonderful for others and ourselves, then even hard work has an element of play in it.

11. NVC relies on emotional granularity: expanding our vocabulary to be able to describe more precisely what we are feeling. Are we angry, annoyed or appalled? The benefits of emotional granularity include less binge drinking, less reactivity to rejection and less severe anxiety and depression.
12. Responsibility is an energy. Responsibility is an energy. Responsibility is an energy. I must remember that. And, when I forget, I must remember that anxiety is also an energy!

Imagine we never felt anxious. Sure, we’d be mellow as fuck, but there’d be no adventures, no laughter, no stories to tell our grand kids. I’m anxious — GREAT. My body is priming me to get shit done. So let’s do it.

ADVENTURE

13. Adventure follows a three act story structure and, just like stories, you can have an adventure about anything.
14. There were 821 sleeps between my last pre-pandemic trip abroad (Urk with The Tim Traveller) and my first foreign travel post-pandemic (Rudenoise with The Tim Traveller). It was good to be back: foreign travel, if we allow it, is an exquisite empathy machine.
15. I learned a heck a lot about myself and my compatriots (as well as to always carry a spare chain link) while cycling another 1,818km around Britain, from Kings Lynn to Inverness, with a side tour of the whiskey isles and kyles of the Argyll.
16. I might have cracked the secret to wild camping while cycle touring in England. Even better, cycle touring is now a year-round activity for me. In winter, there are fewer dog walkers to sniff out your camp and, in the deep darkness after five, anywhere flat is a great, secluded place to pitch up.
17. Perhaps another 2,500km to ride before my round Britain twice tour is completed. Or perhaps not…

Looking at the gaps in the journey already — the northeastern tip of East Anglia, the north coast of Devon and Cornwall, the Black Country, the Welsh heartland, and, not least, Grimsby — I’m wondering: shall this ride ever be complete?

18. Ecopsychology is defined as conversations around the dwelling place of our soul, where nature is our teacher and we can be but facilitators. In Sweden, apparently, secret beauty spots are called ‘wild strawberries’. Psithurism is the whispering sound of the wind among leaves.
19. There is no point in walking the length of all the portici in Bologna. That’s why I tried.
20. The ruined socialist luxury hotel complex at Kupari in Croatia scores 4.6 stars on from 179 reviews. Just up the road, the Chinese finished building a bridge in Dalmatia so that Croatia could join the EU in 2024.
21. My 100th Day of Adventure started with me trying to discourage the local dogs from chewing up our cyclists’ helmets that’d been left scattered around camp after a long day’s ride. The year ended with a staggering 127 Days of Adventure.
22. As of 2020, mycologists had named about 148,000 different species of fungus. The current best guess is that there are at least another 2.65 million more to be stumbled upon. At the absolute most, my ignorant, but open-minded, walk in the Brecon Beacons unwittingly uncovered 0.0001 percent of fungal diversity.
23. It’s impossible to acknowledge, let alone thank, all the visible and invisible kindnesses that made Thighs of Steel possible this year. Philoxenia, the love of strangers and travellers, is alive and thriving.
24. I’m really lucky to have shared adventures this year with over a hundred wonderful people. You know who you are, but special mention to my mum who stomped through the clag with me on the twenty-five mile trail of Eliot’s Little Gidding.

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time

CONNECTION

25. It’s great to remember how much connection can be made in a year — and yet the numbers are finite and, like anything, need constant care. The work is worthwhile because happiness spreads through our social networks up to the level of our friends’ friends’ friends.
26. I saw or spoke with 54 friends and family (-3 vs 2021) across the course of 957 interactions (+119 vs 2021) this year. 17 of those friends and family (31%) accounted for 700 interactions (73%). However, among the 12 most important of those friends and family, year on year interactions went down by 117 and I managed to increase my contact with only 3 of those people this year. On the plus side, I made 2 new friends this year, while 4 old friends also made a welcome comeback.
27. It feels like I have friends everywhere I go. I also realised that I love hosting people: this year I welcomed my first pair of Warmshowers cycle tourers (and promptly passed one of them onto my friends in France).
28. Propinquity, committing your presence to the here and now, is the art of staying alive to the ever-present danger of The Cataclysmic Event Hypothesis.

Instead of ‘minding your own business’ or jacking up on virtual propinquity through your phone screen, look to strengthen the connections you have with the beings immediately around you. You never know when and how they might need you — and you might need them.

29. In 2015, I sent an average of 13 text messages per day. I just checked and, since I installed Whatsapp on my phone in July 2021, I’ve sent 13,358 messages — that’s 25 messages per day, an increase of almost 100 percent in six years. We overestimate how ‘convenient’ text communication is and underestimate how good a proper voice call will make us feel.
30. Statista forecast that 8,890,000,000,000,000,000 megabytes of data were created, captured, copied, and consumed worldwide in 2022. It’s completely overwhelming to think of all the billions of hours that are put into tending our digital society every day. Maybe it’s time to divert some of that attention back to our offline communities.
31. I habitually check and recheck the sports pages as a form of self-soothing and reward. So it wasn’t a complete surprise to learn that losing my home internet connection was, ironically, a great way to connect, free of distraction, defaulting and spidering. (And, surprisingly, this wasn’t because I spent less time on messaging and email.)

Nothing creates the impression of limitless time as having nothing to do. Not because I’ve done nothing, but because I stopped when I’d done the important things.

HUMANS

32. In Italy, instead of making small talk about the weather, denizens prefer gastronomic tittle-tattle: ‘What did you cook last night?’, ‘What did you have for breakfast?’, ‘Terrible year for aubergines — but how about dem courgettes, eh?’
33. The four hours after we wake is the absolute worst time to read or share The News. This isn’t about avoiding important information; this is about respecting how that information is going to land with your own hormones and those of other people.
34. I strongly believe that we’re not living in a computer simulation. I’m probably wrong. Just one of 27 things that I currently or once believed and now totally don’t. Or soon won’t.
35. Lesson: I really enjoy telling stories. In June, I did my first podcast with Bikepacking Buds.
36. The second century followers of the gnostic Carpocrates believed that human souls must go through every possible earthly experience before they are released and return to god’s side in heaven.
37. Humans are amazingly adaptable animals and even the relentless routine of Thighs of Steel cycle touring — early starts, big climbs, late nights — can become quotidian, tapping into fathomless reservoirs of energy that daily life rarely demands.

As we sweated up to the Basilica of Notre-Dame de Fourvière, one of the cyclists remarked: ‘I can’t wait to go on more adventures like this, now I know what I’m capable of!’

I had to disagree with her: ‘No you don’t. That’s the point. You’ve cycled 600km in six days, in a heatwave, and you still haven’t hit the wall. You have NO IDEA what you’re capable of.’

PLAY

39. The Beatles: statistically not as good as Dylan. Plus you can still see Dylan perform. Whether you enjoy the experience might depend more on what you believe is the purpose of live music: to recreate the recorded material or to create something new, specific to this place, these people and this moment in time.
40. I learned how to surf. At least in theory: ‘the restless movement of the ocean against the underside of the board creates many additional hydrodynamic forces that combine with buoyancy to keep the surfer from sinking. Yes, it’s basically a miracle’.
41. Laughing so much that you strain your intercostal muscles is INCREDIBLY painful. A reminder too that physicality is personality.
42. Going to the sauna is a keystone habit for me: not only good for my physical health, but also a big screen-free reset button for my mind. I never know who I’m going to meet or what 80 degree conversations I might have: the Egyptian owner of a local nightclub, a woman who runs psychedelic sacred spaces… my childhood babysitter?!
43. I never imagined that investment in a digitised cartoon could set in motion a chain of events that end here:

CARBON

44. I took the Flight Free pledge again this year. It’s easy for me: overlanding wins on all three sides of The Travel Triangle: Cost, Time and Comfort. 2002 Dave would’ve taken four flights this year; 2022 Dave took none, dodging a literal tonne of carbon equivalent emissions. That doesn’t mean I stayed at home. In fact, I spent less than half the year at home and a quarter of the year travelling abroad.
45. I took 38 car trips this year, driving a total of 5106 miles — the distance from Bournemouth to Beijing. This is slightly less driving than in 2021, but still the equivalent of 48.3 mature trees’ worth of carbon. My average trip distance was 135 miles, less than the average range of even the cheapest electric cars. Hm.
46. Climate Action Tracker rates the UK as having one of the most effective net zero policies in the world. Even so, that policy is still ranked as only ‘almost sufficient’ to limit global heating to 1.5C. Must do better.

BODIES

47. Simon Jackson, Head of Bike Fit at Cadence, chose a 45-second squat as his desert island conditioning exercise. This is the One Stretch To Rule Them All.
48. Womb = Uterus. One of the many things I learned about the menstrual cycle on BBC podcast 28ish Days Later. Only 15 minutes an episode so nothing to lose.
49. If you complain about your sleep quality, then you’re simply making things worse for yourself. Poor-sleeping complainers sleep worse and have worse health outcomes than poor-sleeping noncomplainers.
50. 2022 was the year I finally learned how to make sourdough. I haven’t quite mastered the soggy bottom, but I’ll get there… Thanks to Annie for all her help. Also: Dark Chocolate Ginger Flapjacks. YES.
51. For the sake of my blood sugar levels, I should eat a handful of almonds ten minutes before breakfast and remember to take a brisk walk after lunch and dinner.

THANK YOU

52. This is a list about things I’ve learned in 2022 and at the heart of that learning is YOU.

Knowing that you good people are out there, making time in your lives to read my stories, is why I reflect so deeply on the things that I do and make time to organise my thoughts in writing.

The feedback I get when you share my stories with your friends, reach out to teach me something new, or choose to support this project financially is a wellspring of motivation.

You’ve kept me going this year; I hope the words I’ve put down have sometimes kept you going too. Thank you.

This is so much fun. Watch what happens when I attempt to mindlessly browse the BBC Sport website yesterday 👇

Over the last month, I’ve been mulling restlessly over my consumption of sports news.

As you know, I am a huge fan of No News Is Good News.

But I also have the misfortune to be a fan of certain sports — or, rather, I find myself seeking out sports news as a sort of soothing medication for certain twenty-first century maladies of the soul for which a lasting cure would risk rupturing the fabric of my fragile ego.

The last month, then, has been ripe for medication.

Vacant Escapism

My dissatisfaction with sports-soothing was particularly acute when I was cycling from Edinburgh to Inverness a few weeks ago (stories here and here) — especially as the icy weather and early darkness would lure us indoors, often into places where the football was showing on screens large and small.

I found these ghostly attractions hard to resist and the vacant escapism of watching other people literally play out their lives in the desert heat of Qatari sports grounds created in me a strong sense of cognitive dissonance.

Subsuming myself to a screen is the very opposite of the connections of propinquity that I say I most value, and those I say I seek, most especially when I travel.

Either I’m a useless hypocrite or else nnnguhhhhhh?

What Cost Sports-Soothing?

I didn’t know what to do with this uncomfortable cognitive dissonance until, early this morning, at home in bed, I found myself switching on the radio to catch the last rites of the England men’s cricket team winning in Pakistan.

I could have been night-dreaming, day-dreaming, or even just listening to the whine of tinnitus in my left ear canal.

Instead I was lying in the dark, listening to someone else describe what they’d seen someone else do on a patch of lawn 6180km away.

Once I’d finished revelling in the statistical playground that was England’s ‘historic’ (what does that even mean?!) victory, I was sobered by an uninvited soul-searcher:

What opportunity cost am I absent-mindedly paying for my addiction to sports-soothing?

I’m sure you’re familiar with the idea of opportunity costs — they’re the things you could have done instead of doing the thing that you went and did.

When you start thinking about opportunity costs, it can rapidly spiral you into needing-a-lie-down-time.

Like: I studied Egyptology at university AT THE COST OF EVERY SINGLE OTHER DISCIPLINE, INTEREST, VOCATION, CAREER and, indeed, EXISTENCE.

Gosh. Thanks, Dave. Massive FOMO. Just what I needed more of.

Woolly Mammoths & Butterfly Wings

The way I see it, there are two species of opportunity cost that arise from our life choices.

There are the woolly mammoth costs, like not choosing a degree in radiology, fine arts or Xhosa and the careers thereby closed off forever.

Psychologically, the woolly mammoths are actually fairly manageable. They are so big that we tend to commit one way or another: interminable regret or indignant justification.

And, being egotistical fipple-flute humans, we tend to go for the latter.

Even if the decision is fairly arbitrary (I was always more Indiana Jones than Star Wars as a kid), it’s our decision so we don’t usually find it too hard to make peace with our chosen path.

Like the actual woolly mammoths, the psychological pain associated with massive and obvious opportunity costs tend to go extinct pretty quick. Definitely within 800,000 years, anyway.

But our daily lives are brimming with minute decisions that bear almost invisible opportunity costs that take their power from accumulation: our habitual opportunity costs, the butterfly wings that become the hurricane.

And our habitual opportunity costs aren’t just any common or garden butterfly.

They are none other than Papilio antimachus, the African giant swallowtail, which oozes a deadly poison called ouabain that kills by cardiac arrest.

Despite being smaller than a chequebook, these are the ones you need to be worrying about.

Masked in a cloak of apparent insignificance, we don’t tend to notice the cumulative cost of our chequebook-sized habits until we look over our end-of-life accounts and marvel at how much we’ve spent.

Whereas woolly mammoth costs loom large and fade rapidly, butterfly wing costs loom almost invisibly small, but simply won’t stop growing, dammit.

What’s the opportunity cost of choosing to take the bus to work instead of cycling?

Well, maybe not much on Day One, but come Day Four Thousand And Forty Seven, you might realise that you are still not a confident cyclist, not able to fix a puncture, not as fit as you once were, not as stoic in a rain shower and maybe not even in such a good place psychologically.

Oops.

103 Lost Moments

Picking a random week in the past month, from my web history I can see that I scrolled through 103 unique BBC Sport stories.

That’s fourteen stories a day and doesn’t capture the number of times I refreshed the headlines, only the number of times I clicked through.

What were the opportunity costs for each of those 103 stories? It’s really hard to say without context.

So here’s context: I lied. That wasn’t a random week in the past month: that was the week I cycled from Edinburgh to Inverness.

Now what was the opportunity cost of those 103 disconnected moments?

Those moments when I could have been watching, listening, speaking, breathing, sharing and connecting with the landscape, society and stories around me, I was instead reading up on the ‘frightening depth’ (what does that even mean?!) of Gareth Southgate’s squad.

Fear & Soothing In Las Dave-gas

Now. I don’t want to beat myself up too much here, but I do think it’s worth plunging my Marigolded hands into the dirty washing up bowl of my mind, just once, to see if I can scoop out the gunk that’s been blocking up the drain of my mind and triggering my mindless sports-soothing.

If I can locate the trigger behind all the tabs, then I might be able to soothe those triggers in a way that doesn’t leave me feeling disconnected and all cognitive dissonancey.

Firstly, let’s get this myth out of the way: I’m certainly not triggered by a need for information when I click over to BBC Sport.

And this probably goes for you too, whatever your medication be. We seek information in a specific and timely way, we don’t go browsing for it.

Ah! But what’s this, dredged up from the deep, mottled with mould and crawling with lice?

Two triggers that get right to the base of my ganglia: fear and reward.

Fear

This trigger is a fear of what might happen if I permit my brain a moment without focus.

It’s not boredom. It’s not yet boredom.

It’s a state of pre-boredom. My brain flags the end of one activity and rapidly steps in with another, even if vacuous, to fill the void.

Over the past thirty years of maturation, my brain has somehow morphed into the encephalous version of an early Victorian preacher declaiming hellfire and damnation, for an idle mind is the devil’s workshop!

So I scroll over to BBC Sport and soothe my fraught neurons with talk of how French goalkeeper Hugo Lloris texted England’s Harry Kane after the latter struck a penalty kick, if anything, a little too well.

Reward

A despised manager gets the sack, a rival loses heavily to a lower league team, a goalkeeper in amateur football scores with a goal kick.

Once in a month, the one-armed bandit shells out and a deal is struck: my mind’s association between BBC Sport and pleasure is stuck.

The next time I finish writing a paragraph, I reward myself with the BBC’s analysis of Ben Doak’s career prospects.

The outcome when I satisfy triggers of both fear and reward is a soothing of the mind. Rather than staying with the end of a task, I soothe my agitation with sport.

A Wave Of Brilliance

If my BBC Sport habit isn’t working for me, then what can I replace it with?

Nothing would be a good option.

Doing nothing, I would allow my brain the opportunity to rest, grow bored, and perhaps, in time, spit out a wave of brilliance.

However: it’s very difficult to replace a habit of doing something with a habit of doing nothing. That’s why they call them Zen Masters and not Zen Easypeasers.

That’s also why I’ve struggled with using distraction-taming apps like Freedom or Unpluq: they simply block your access to such and such a website.

They don’t offer any alternative, except sometimes a homily about taking a moment to breathe or some other patronising guff that doesn’t come close to meeting my desperate underlying need for soothing.

If I can’t have nothing, then what I need is something that promotes connection through novelty, something that rewards and soothes, and something that, through its randomness, might INSPIRE something in me instead of leaving me with the uneasy knowledge that Ronnie O’Sullivan compared his snooker opponent to Mr Bean.

Then, in a flash, I realised that there must be a way of programming my web browser to redirect every BBC Sport page to the Wikipedia Random Article page!

Within seconds, I’d found the Redirector add-on for Firefox and my sport-soothing days were over.

Ironic, then, that Wikipedians, like me, seem to have an overwhelming obsession with sports…

Sportipedia

There are 6,590,624 articles in the English Wikipedia, about half of which are stubs containing nothing more than a couple of sentences.

According to a 2016 survey of 1,000 random articles, 16 percent of articles are about sports. According to a random survey I just carried out, it’s now more like 25 percent.

But at least I now know of the death last year of Poerio Mascella, an Italian goalkeeper who played for Serie D side Pistoiese during their glory years of the 1970s.

After three days, my habit of mindlessly browsing BBC Sport, whether for fear or reward, has already withered.

I wouldn’t say that I have found a Zen-like state of peace with my relationship to my web browser, but I do now find myself typing in the address of bbc.co.uk/sport with glee.

Ahh, there!

Now this story is written, I can spin the wheel and claim my reward…

~

More inspiration for random redirects:

• Poetry By Heart’s Random Poem
• Quotations Page Random Quotes
• Wiktionary in any language (appropriately enough, my first English trial took me to bah humbug)
• Wikiversity (seems to be mostly course outlines, mind)

Bonus: If you’re ever in need of emergency randomness, hit Alt-Shift+X from inside Wikipedia.

That’s a valiant flea that dare eat his breakfast on the lip of a lion!

This week, prompted by an app called Zoe, I have been experimenting with my morning repast.

On Tuesday, I ate a single bagel, then nothing for three hours. On Wednesday, I devoured a bowl of nothing but avocado. Thursday was (glory be) avocado on a bagel and today was a plain bagel immediately followed by a 30-minute brisk walk.

And here’s what those diabolically calibrated breakfasts each did to my blood sugar:

Note: The yellow line is when I ate breakfast. The blue shaded area is the three hour test period.

1. Plain bagel: blood sugar spikes and gradually descends — but remains higher than my typical baseline for this time of day. 5/5 on the hungry scale (ravenous).
2. Pure avocado: blood sugar doesn’t rise at all. 4/5 on the hungry scale (wolfish).
3. Bagel + avocado: blood sugar rises, but only after a 30-minute delay and it never goes as high as on Tuesday. 1/5 on the hungry scale (I could eat).
4. Bagel + walk: again, blood sugar rises, not as high as on Tuesday, but followed by a more steeper and deeper decline. 2/5 on the hungry scale (peckish).

One of the things I find interesting about these breakfasts is that there is no place for protein.

I’d always thought that protein = satiety, but it turns out that combining carbs and fats also = satiety. Even a brisk walk = satiety! How can a walk fill you up? Mind blown.

But, while a post-prandial walk (or any kind of exercise, science suggests) seems to flatten the blood sugar spike, it did leave my blood sugar levels lower than the other breakfasts. Something to play around with.

I was also struck by how much fat Zoe recommended I eat with my bagel: 200g. That’s two whole avocados — a lot more than you’d get on your smashed avo in a hipster cafe.

So that’s a couple of things I never knew about my body. I’m looking forward to learning more, particularly about what times of day I deal with food best — my glucose levels seem to struggle in the evenings.

(Note: Your blood and guts might respond to this kind of experiment very differently. There’s a reason why this is called ‘personalised nutrition’. See how you go!)

Tomorrow, breakfast will be a bowl of avocado, a 10-minute pause, and then the bagel.

I’ve no idea what might happen to me personally, but I’d never previously considered the idea that sequencing foods might make any difference at all. I’ll report back!

Rare words! brave world! Hostess, my breakfast, come!
O, I could wish this tavern were my drum!

Incidentally, did you know that, in France, they have breakfast at lunchtime?

In French, ‘dejeuner’ means ‘lunch’ in English, but etymologically translates as ‘breakfast’ — ‘jeuner’ being the French verb ‘to fast’.

Although some people also use ‘dejeuner’ to refer to ‘breakfast’, the more common term for ‘breakfast’ in French is ‘petit dejeuner’ or ‘little breakfast’. Very confusing.

What are you most fearful of or what stops you from bringing every part of yourself to a relationship and sharing your whole heart, warts and all, with your partner?

I’m a newish member of a Men’s Circle, a group of guys who meet every fortnight to listen (and talk). We also drink tea and eat biscuits, but mainly we listen (and talk).

Every meeting is an inspiration — not because we all sit around patting ourselves on the back, but because everyone, every week, has So. Much. Going. Down.

No one’s behaviour is perfect all the time, of course, but the circle leaves me feeling that it’s outright miraculous how generous, loving and, well, functional everyone is most of the time, given what’s going down in our lives and in our heads all the time.

And the people around this circle aren’t special (no offence). Every person I meet on the street, in the library or at the sauna will also be wrestling with just as many demons, internal and external, I’m sure.

The circle changes the way I see the world:

• Someone’s rude? Wow, sorry. You’ve got a lot going down right now. (Probably needs a circle…)
• Someone’s kind, despite everything that’s going down right now? Double wow — thank you. (Probably needs a circle…)

Everyone — in the circle and beyond — is doing their best and, transcending the banality of the motivational poster, we really are all in this together.

Popping The Question

The question at the top was a prompt brought to this week’s circle by one of the men.

But it wasn’t his question. It was a question he’d been given after asking several women another question:

If you could put just one question to a whole group of guys, what would you ask?

Unanimously, every time, this was their answer:

What are you most fearful of or what stops you from bringing every part of yourself to a relationship and sharing your whole heart, warts and all, with your partner?

Big question, huh?

But what was really interesting was the unanimous response from men around the circle. We threw the question right back:

Wait a second — are you sure you’re ready to hold space for me to be vulnerable with you?

Depth Or Distrust?

It’s not that men didn’t also want a deeper level of connection in their relationships, but I think it’s fair to say that we all shared past experiences where our partners haven’t always welcomed male vulnerability or seen it as a strength.

Without breaking any confidences, many of us had been burned in the past when we have tried to share wholeheartedly and found our vulnerability rejected or pushed back, a shaming experience that contributed to the breakdown of several relationships.

Hence the distrust around the circle: if we feel that we’ve been punished for showing vulnerability in the past, what makes you different? Why should we trust you when you ask us for wholeheartedness?

I refuse to conclude from this apparent impasse that our partners might be saying they want one thing when they secretly want another — that sounds pretty patronising to me.

I reckon there’s something much more interesting going on here.

You’ll Need A Surgeon For Open Heart Surgery

(Note: I’ll be talking in terms of ‘men’ and ‘women’ in the context of heterosexual relationships here because that’s how it was framed in our discussion and, as a cis heterosexual male, I don’t feel qualified to talk across the whole rainbow of humanity’s wonderful combinations and pollinations.

I’d be super interested to hear how it plays out from your perspective if you fancy replying to this email.)

I think it’s perfectly possible that a woman can desire more wholeheartedness from their partner, while, at exactly the same time, the man in this relationship finds that his wholeheartedness isn’t always positively received.

These two experiences are not incompatible.

One of the distinctive traits of Man Sloth Mode is that men, particularly those in relationships, become increasingly dependent on their partner — another experience that was echoed around the circle.

It’s more than likely that your partner really does want you to be more vulnerable with them. It’s also highly likely that it’s neither healthy nor possible for them to carry the weight of being your only emotional support network.

It’s one thing to open up to your partner, it’s quite another to tear into your flesh, rip out your ribcage and spill blood and guts in the hope that they can perform open heart surgery.

(Note to self: you’ll need a surgeon for that.)

Shooting Ourselves In The Face (As Per)

In general, women survive relationship breakdown much better than men, primarily because, well, for example:

The analyses reveal that women have larger networks and receive supports from multiple sources, while men tend to rely on their spouses exclusively.

Once again, the support systems that men fail to put in place around themselves, in combination with an overreliance on one (let’s be honest) caregiver, is shooting ourselves in the face.

(I say face rather than foot here because, frankly, I’ve always wanted to start a new idiom. But it’s also a more graphic reflection of the damage we’re doing to ourselves, not to mention the messy clean up job required of other people.)

Women want more vulnerability from their men, but men don’t trust that they will be held, most probably based on past experiences where they have become overreliant on a single partner.

It’s a heartbreaking cycle that will only be broken when men find emotional support from outside the pair bond.

Your Boat Needs A Crew

Reluctance to share wholehearted vulnerability comes from a deep-rooted fear of rejection.

In answer to your question, women, that’s what we’re most afraid of.

But — but but but — that fear only looms so large for us because, most often, you and you alone represent at least, ooh, 80 percent of our entire emotional support network.

No wonder we’re petrified of rejection. Your acceptance is (almost) everything to us.

And that, my friends, is an INSANE way to live our lives.

It’s totally unrealistic to expect one person to carry such pivotal weight in someone else’s life — no wonder sometimes our vulnerability is rejected. It’s too much to bear.

The solution is to create an independent emotional support network — like a Men’s Circle — that can nourish us with the affirmation, acceptance and assurance that we need to feel heard.

(Hint: a network is not one person. Shoot for twelve and you might get six.)

High up in the rigging of love, with that net beneath to catch us, the rejection of one person, however important they may have once been, is not the be-all and end-all.

It’s just one person who couldn’t accept your wholehearted beingness.

In the words of shame and vulnerability researcher Brené Brown: if you miss the boat, it wasn’t your boat.

And that’s a muuuuuch easier lesson to accept if you’ve got your whole crew beside you on the harbourside, friends and comrades who’ll buy you fish and chips, help re-pack your sea chest, and wait with you until your ship finally comes in.

September 17, 30 degree heat, Akropolis in sight. The culmination of seven months’ hard preparation and two months’ hard riding.

It was a spectacular summer, filled to the brim with vivid experiences and vital friendships. But, as I reluctantly turned my handlebars back northwest, I felt pretty empty.

So, as our ferry chugged inexorably across the Channel, I started a list of things to get excited about this winter.

When your whole being has been consumed by one or two projects and both those projects come to an abrupt end at the same time, it takes a force of will to step outside once more and rediscover, or reaffirm, who you are or who you aspire to be.

If I were an athlete, this winter would be my ‘off-season’, an opportunity to focus again on the basics, the training and training ground routines, rather than the exhilaration and exhaustion of competitive matchplay.

What do I want to learn? Where do I want to stretch myself? Who do I want to become for next season?

I won’t jinx the entire list by sharing it here, but here are a few winter wins that give you an insight into three areas where I want to grow.

Leadership & Communication

The nine months I have spent this year helping to steer Thighs of Steel have taught me a lot about myself and particularly about how I respond under pressure and time stress.

The main thing I have learnt is how important it is to keep lines of communication open, be honest about my feelings and needs, and make sure that empathy is flowing in both directions, between myself and the rest of the team (and, well, anyone else too!).

As Ernest Hemingway once wrote to F Scott Fitzgerald: grace under pressure.

With that in mind, I have signed up to an introductory course in Nonviolent Communication (NVC), a technique developed in the 1960s by psychologist Marshall Rosenberg.

I’ve also resumed my counselling sessions and (excitingly) joined a Men’s Circle here in Bournemouth (thanks LH!).

Outdoorsyness

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: winter is the finest time to explore outdoor adventures in the UK.

Shorter days mean we can not only catch both sunrise and sunset at a reasonable hour, but also spend long evenings with the stars.

Out of season hotspots, like Dartmoor, the Lakes, North Pennines, Wales or the Highlands, are empty. The views, like the shadows, are long and clear and the weather is either exactly as expected or surprisingly delightful – no possible disappointment.

So, in late November, I’m travelling up to Scotland to cycle another leg of my Round Britain ride.

Since 2020, I’ve cycled about 4,500km of the coastline and now I’m eyeing up the 650km from Edinburgh to Inverness.

This’ll be the first time I’ve done a serious cycle tour in the UK in winter. I’m curious. And foolhardy. And optimistic.

I’m also mushroom picking in the Brecon Beacons and, with my intrepid mum, going on an unexpected tea room of an adventure to Little Gidding, the fourth of TS Eliot’s Four Quartets.

Learning

Learning forces us to remember that we’re not dead yet.

It reminds us that our brains are plastic (the good kind of plastic) and that we are very much unfinished animals.

Whether teaching your old self a new trick or honing a dulled blade, learning shows us that, in spite of everything, we are making headway.

A great winter win to have in your back pocket.

This year, as well as the NVC course I mentioned, I’m learning how to make sourdough from the delicious bakers at Bakehouse 24, getting guitar lessons from a chap who works for Specsavers (thanks again LH!), and building a FREAKIN SAUNA with a carpenter friend of mine.

I’ve also enrolled in a four-month Zoe Personalised Nutrition programme that involves a continuous blood sugar sensor, gut health and blood fat tests… and loads of muffins. Can’t wait!

Winter Wins

I’m not usually one for bucket lists, but I really needed this.

I know that I can’t do everything on my list, but just knowing that I’m already doing some of the things, even if only the small things, will give me enough momentum to carry me through the dark days.

Cornell University professor Karl Weick introduced the concept of small wins in a 1984 paper about redefining the scale of social problems.

‘Once a small win has been accomplished,’ Weick wrote, ‘forces are set in motion that favour another small win.’

What one small, good thing can you do today that will set you up for another small, good thing tomorrow?

Yesterday, for example, I asked a friend whether she knew anyone who taught guitar. Today, she sent over the number of that guy from Specsavers who teaches guitar on the side. Tomorrow, when I’m back in the library, I’ll message him to set up a lesson.

And in one year’s time? I’ll be opening the London Palladium!

Or maybe I’ll just be a little better at making music. Either way, I’m happy: I have sustainable momentum in the direction I want to travel.

And if, at any point over the coming months, I feel myself drifting or dissatisfied, then I can come back to this list, remind myself of why I’m here, and do one small thing to regain that momentum.

Winter wins. What are yours?

Anxiety is a big reason that Thighs of Steel managed support 95 cyclists over 5,408km from Glasgow to Athens and raise over £110,000 for grassroots refugee projects.

All thanks to good old anxiety.

I don’t mean that metaphorically, mystically or even mythically. I mean that in a very concrete way.

One tiny example

Two weeks before the ride set off, I was up late, worrying. As you do.

With 50 cycling days across 9 arduous weeks, Thighs of Steel is built on a rigid schedule: there is scarcely any wiggle room for disasters that take time out of the day.

Restlessly I mind-scrolled through each of the weeks, trying to imagine how they would all go horribly wrong, in as much catastrophising detail as my stress-addled brain would allow.

Week 2 of the ride, from Bristol to Paris, involved 529km of beautiful cycling through the cathedral towns, rolling countryside and luscious woodlands of southern England, into croissant-nibbling, cheese-munching, chateau-spotting France.

We would cycle, we would camp, we would cycle, we would camp, we would cycle, we would camp, we would catch a ferry, we would cyc —

Shit — I haven’t booked the ferry!

Heart pounding, blood rising, I leapt out of bed and dashed to the computer, praying to the four goddesses of St Christopher’s lucky rabbit foot that the ferry we had to be on would have last-minute space for 17 cyclists and a massive van.

We could neither afford the re-route to another port a hundred kilometres away, nor the five hour delay to wait for a later ferry.

Of course, the four goddesses were smiling upon me that night. But the real reason that disaster was averted was thanks to — yep — good old anxiety.

Good Old Anxiety

Like I said, that’s just one tiny example.

The disaster-spotting and problem-solving energy of anxiety came to our rescue thousands of times before we ever left home and on a near minute-by-minute basis during the ride.

The towering success of the ride was founded on anxiety.

The problem is that, if you have my sort of interpretation of anxiety, then that last sentence sounds AWFUL.

Who wants to feel anxious the whole time? Anxiety is a horrible feeling! (says I).

But this is only one interpretation of anxiety.

There is another sort of interpretation, one that acknowledges the energy and power that anxiety gives us.

Imagine the opposite. Imagine we never felt anxious. Imagine we went around in a semi-tranquillised state all the time. Nothing would happen!

Sure, we’d be mellow as fuck, but there’d be no adventures, no laughter, no stories to tell our grand kids.

Heart Pounding, Blood Rising

Ultimately, anxiety is a physiological response to a situation: heart pounding in my chest, blood rising to my neck.

However, the fact that I have interpreted anxiety as ‘a horrible feeling’ is wholly psychological.

For some reason, ‘horrible’ has become my default interpretation of that physiological response — at least in some circumstances.

Heart pounding, blood rising is actually my physiological response to quite a few things, many of which I interpret as ‘right good fun’.

But when it comes to what I call ‘work’, I default to an interpretation that makes me feel shitty about the energy that I call ‘anxiety’.

Incidentally, this seems to be getting worse as I get older, and as more and more of my day-to-day activities are labelled as ‘work’ and therefore potentially labelled as anxiety-inducing.

And that’s not all…

Shitty Interpretation = Shitty Thoughts

My shitty interpretation of anxiety leads to a cascade of shitty thoughts.

Firstly, I feel shitty for feeling shitty. I beat myself up for feeling anxious instead of some other emotion that I’ve labelled as ‘non-shitty’.

Secondly, I’m more likely for my shittiness to take over and colour the rest of my world experience.

For example: if there are other people around, then I’m likely to try and pin the blame on them for some aspect of the situation.

Why didn’t anyone else book the ferry? Why did it have to be me up at night worrying? How crap am I going feel tomorrow after losing so much sleep?

Then, thirdly, I feel shitty about myself for being shitty about other people.

Not One, But TWO Vicious Cycles — Yay!

So that’s shitty thought cascade is vicious cycle number one:

Anxiety ➡️ Being Shitty About Others ➡️ Ugh, I’m Shitty ➡️ Anxiety Rebound

But until now my only management technique for anxiety has been to try to push the anxiety further away: I shouldn’t be feeling like this. I should be feeling tra-la-la, la-di-dee instead.

Unfortunately, something you probably know about human anatomy is that our feelings are held in place (with cartilage to the spleen, I’m told) by a very powerful spring: push them away and they come back twice as hard to smack you in the face.

And, boom, that’s vicious cycle number two:

Anxiety ➡️ Push Anxiety Away ➡️ Anxiety Rebound

Ouch

So the alternative interpretation of anxiety cannot be the false YAY I’M SO HAPPY LOOK AT ME I’M HAPPY.

The alternative interpretation is (drum roll and pull quote please):

Don’t ignore the anxiety or push it away. Don’t pretend that anxiety is always a lovely buzzy feeling of excitement (but remember that sometimes it is).

Instead, acknowledge that anxiety gets shit done. Respect the energy it generates.

All those physiological changes in our bodies make us perform better. Anxiety is not hindering, but empowering us.

That shot of adrenalin, the pounding heart and the rising blood give us the physiological boost we need to spot and solve difficult problems and work through disasters without anyone dying (hopefully).

Anxiety is not enjoyable, but it is useful.

So this story is a shout out to anxiety. I want to remember all the millions of times in the past that this uncomfortable emotion has saved all our asses.

Then, next time Sinjoro Maltrankvilo (as they say in Esperanto) comes galloping along, maybe I can tip my hat, grit my teeth and welcome him with a stern handshake and a whiskey.

My pardner’s back in town. What’s the job?

~

Thanks to Ben from Align Mind Body for a good chat that clarified how I’d tackle this topic today. As a meditation teacher, Ben knows all about observing emotions and finding that space between observation and interpretation. And — oh look! — he’s running an Intensive Meditation Foundation Course, starting on 24 October.

How rested you feel tomorrow will depend on the bedtime story you tell yourself.

If you complain about your sleep quality, then you’re simply making things worse for yourself: poor-sleeping complainers sleep worse and have worse health outcomes than poor-sleeping noncomplainers.

Personally, I use a passage in Viktor Frankl’s Auschwitz memoir, Man’s Search For Meaning, to train myself into the belief that I am indeed an excellent sleeper:

Somewhere it is said that man cannot exist without sleep for more than a stated number of hours. Quite wrong! I had been convinced that there were certain things I just could not do: I could not sleep without this or I could not live with that or the other.

The first night in Auschwitz we slept in beds which were constructed in tiers. On each tier (measuring about six-and-a-half to eight feet) slept nine men, directly on the boards. Two blankets were shared by each of the nine men. We could, of course, lie only on our sides, crowded and huddled against each other.

… And yet sleep came and brought oblivion and relief from pain for a few hours.

Greetings from, well, the United Kingdom.

It’s been exactly three months since I was last ‘home’ and two months since I left this island.

Anything big happen since I left?

Let’s see now…

HOLY CRAP.

• Work on the world’s largest windfarm was completed off the coast of Yorkshire. It’s record will superseded by another being built off these shores next year.
• Waltham Forest became the first council in the UK to divest fossil fuels from their pension fund.
• A trial showed that Oxford University’s malaria vaccine is the cheapest and most effective yet, with protection up to 80 percent. Not bad for a disease that (speculatively) may have killed 50 billion humans to date.
• The University of Manchester have developed the first diagnostic test for Parkinson’s.
• Period products became free in Scotland.
• Cycling is booming in the UK with weekday journeys up 47% since 2021.
• Doctors will soon be able to prescribe free bikes.
• 86 percent of British companies that took part in a 3,300 person trial of the 4-day working week say that they plan to keep the model.
• A pine marten was spotted in London for the first time in a century.
• The proportion of British people who think immigration is ‘bad for the economy’ halved from 42 per cent to 20 per cent. Despite all the frothy headlines over ‘culture wars’, social attitudes in the UK are becoming steadily more liberal.
• Thomas & Friends got its first autistic train character, Bruno the Brake Car, and Peppa Pig got its first same-sex couple.

Amid the dread of returning to the UK, it’s good for me (and you too, perhaps) to remember that, at the same time as things going wrong, some things go right too.

~

I caught up on all that UK news by looking through the weekly Positive News ‘what went right’ archive, which you can also get as a newsletter.

This is part of an accidental mini series on the psychological and ecological benefits of taking new perspectives on life, society, citizenship and the planet.

The first part of the mini series looked at what I see as the organisational purpose of Thighs of Steel and took a new perspective to help me understand why I do anything at all: connection.

This second part will look more closely at happiness and take a new perspective to help assuage or at least understand the economic, ecological and existential distress that so many of us are feeling right now.

I’ll be honest: I wish I could have spent another twelve years researching and writing this piece, hands buried in the soil.

Think of it as a work in progress and please be gentle!

The Three (Or Four) Species Of Happiness

All good things come in threes:

• Jesus, Joseph and Mary
• Earth, Wind And Fire
• Wet Wet Wet

Human happiness is no different: there are exactly three different species. (Except when there’s four, but we can ignore that one later…)

The first species of happiness is the kind that you can only feel when you’re inside the experience right now.

You might feel a sort of experiential penumbra of good vibes for a short time afterwards, but basically the happiness is gone as soon as you leave the situation.

For example, the visceral happiness you get from playing on a swing:

The question at the root of this first variety of happiness is: Am I having fun?

The second species of happiness is the sort you feel even when you’re no longer actually inside the experience.

This is one kind of time and space travel that humans can do: quite unbidden, a remembrance — oh, yes, I’m happy! — pops into our mind.

This sort of happiness is unlikely to stem from playing on the swings. Even this one:

(Watching that video, I think I screamed as much as they did. Worth the build up.)

This second species of happiness is more likely to crop up through a satisfying work life, successful relationships or a family of supportive friends.

The question at the heart of this second variety of happiness is: Does this feel right?

The third type of happiness goes deeper again: it’s an existential happiness, reaching out far beyond our selves and our immediate circle.

It comes from the sense that we exist as one small element of a community and society, a landscape and ecosystem that is thriving in unity together.

The question is: Are we all, people and planet, thriving?

This happiness is something I have felt in the past.

I’m not alone in struggling with it right now.

The Fourth Species

The fourth species of happiness that we can safely ignore is the kind that yogis and Russell Brand talk about:

Transcendence of all earthly happiness through direct connection with The Oneness of The Universe.

But you can forget all that for now — except one word: connection.

(Yes, I know — I’m obsessed with this idea.)

Because all three (or four) species of happiness depend on connection.

Back A Second: What Is Happiness?

Happiness is what happens when our sensory bodies come into contact with an experience and form a positive emotional bond.

When we play on the swings, that bond is easily broken by leaving the playground, and our happiness fades too.

When we form a close relationship with another human, such bonds are more complex, cropping up in more and more of our experiences and environments the longer and stronger that we share a emotional connection.

If that connection is predominantly positive: happiness ensues.

But even the strongest interpersonal relationship cannot sustain our happiness if the ecosystem around us is sick.

It is very hard to be happy when you discover that the earth is burning. Or that Liz Truss has become Prime Minister.

This is where the mushrooms might help. (Not like that! Although…)

The Great Entanglement

On the way back from Greece, I (finally) read Merlin Sheldrake’s book Entangled Life.

Exquisite.

The subtitle is How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, And Shape Our Futures — and, yes, there is a lot of stuff in there about how fungi can forage for food, eat rocks and find the fastest route through IKEA.

But what struck me most forcefully was how, as a mycologist, the more Merlin learned about his subject, the more uncertain he became about what it means to be human.

The first living organisms on land were a collaboration between algae and fungi: lichens. The algae could photosynthesise to produce energy from the sun and the fungi could digest minerals from rock: the perfect partnership.

Likewise, plants are a collaboration between the above-ground photosynthesising organisms and the below-ground fungal mycelial networks that break down and transfer nutrients from organism to organism.

And the breaking down element is crucial: until fungi like the white rot fungus ‘learned’ how to digest plant matter, the earth was coated in a pile of dead plants, kilometres deep.

(This is how we got coal, by the way.)

By digesting dead vegetation, fungi guarantee the cycle of nutrients from one living organism to another. This is the thing we call soil. It wouldn’t exist without fungi.

Even humans are a collaboration between ‘humans’ and untold millions of bacteria, fungi and viruses that help, among many other basic living functions of body and mind, to break down the plants and animals that we eat as food.

It becomes increasingly difficult to determine where human ends and the rest of ecology begins.

Life is, indeed, entangled.

8,890,000,000,000,000,000 Megabytes

Back to that question of existential happiness: right now, do you feel like we are all, people and planet, thriving?

If you’re anything like me, that’s going to come across as a really stupid rhetorical question.

Apart from major scientific advances like the Vegan Sausage Roll, everything’s going to shit.

So what can we do about it?

Here’s one thought.

(It’s not a very clever or original thought, but hear me out because in a second I’m going to get you to imagine being a fungus and that’ll change everything.)

As a society, perhaps we have been putting too much effort into tending our digital networks.

(Told you it wasn’t very clever or original.)

I don’t just mean social media, I mean the creation of the whole World Wide Web.

Statista forecast that 97 zettabytes of data will be created, captured, copied, and consumed worldwide in 2022.

That’s 8,890,000,000,000,000,000 megabytes.

It’s completely overwhelming to think of all the billions of hours that are put into tending our digital society every day.

By necessity, that time is being diverted away from our other projects and has perhaps contributed to the neglect of our society offline.

Finding Balance

That’s not to say that I think online networks can’t be extremely powerful — I doubt that social attitudes in the UK would be becoming so liberal, so quickly if it weren’t for the internet.

But I think we have to be careful that our online networks really are strengthening our ‘real’ offline lives in the direction of greater connectivity and solidarity with the people and planet that make up our ecosystem.

I think this hybrid online-offline model is why Thighs of Steel works so well: people discover the project online, meet each other online and communicate online.

But then we come together for two months in the summer to create a living, breathing community in the ‘real world’.

And it’s that in-person time that changes the wider world for the better, in all the ways that I discussed a couple of weeks ago.

The difficulty is how to imagine change when our problems are so complex and our individual capacity is so limited.

One answer is to change our imaginative model of what it means to be an individual.

(Okay, here’s where things get trippy!)

What if we imagined ourselves as a single exploratory growing tip of a fungus, tiny and courageous, but directly, intimately, unbreakably connected to, entangled with and backed by a mycelial network of unfathomable power and complexity?

Human As Hypha

The growing tips of a fungus are called hyphae, so imagine yourself as a single hyphae, one little growing tip of the human mycelial network that is exploring our society, the landscape, this universe.

It’s easy for you to feel like an individual.

Look too closely and hyphae totally behave as individuals, merrily wiggling around through the soil, looking for yummy dead things to munch.

But zoom out and we see that, despite their apparent behaviour, hyphae are not individuals.

It’s not like there’s a central brain or body that tells the individual hypha what to do, but each one is plugged into a complex and responsive network.

You see: fungal hyphae can somehow sense and communicate across the network.

(I’m not even going to try and butcher the young science: I beg you, please read Merlin’s book.)

If one hypha finds some delicious dead tree stump, very quickly (and mysteriously) the rest of the network will stop what they were doing and turn their attention to devouring it.

As a human hypha, you are exploring on behalf of every other actor in the network — all the other hyphae who can and will respond to every move you make, every touch and every discovery.

That gives you, the connected individual, power, agency — and responsibility.

The network decomposition of the dead tree stump is no mere act of destruction. The capturing and recycling of nutrients is a life-giving act of creation: what we call soil.

As a hypothetical human hyphae, recognise that your influence extends far beyond the human network.

You are also exploring and creating on behalf of the vegetation, the plants and the trees, that depend on the network for life support. No network, no soil.

Consequently, you’re also exploring and creating for the insects and animals that depend on vegetation, and so too for those predators that depend on the life and death of their prey.

See how you are connected — not hypothetically, but literally — to everything else in the ecosystem.

Mycelial Contentment

This is how mushrooms help me fill the pit of despair that has taken the place of my third, existential, species of happiness.

Fungi give me a lens through which to see my existence as both individual and plural.

If I fall into the trap of seeing myself as an individual alone, then it’s too easy to feel powerless about the existential problems we face as a species.

It’s too easy to bumble along, exploring life — experiencing the first two species of happiness, perhaps — but never seeing my intimate role as part of the network that is creating this ecosystem.

And without the sense of living within a healthy ecosystem, I have no hope of experiencing the foundational existential happiness.

Fungi remind me that life is about more than my own personal exploration.

It’s a simultaneous — and utterly entangled — act of personal exploration and collective creation as part of the network.

The metaphor of the human hyphae gives me license to explore and create, to follow my own path, but also to ensure I nurture a healthy network and, in so doing, healthy soil and, ultimately, a healthy ecosystem.

And, perhaps, existential happiness.

So let’s commit to the roles we were born to play: as entangled explorer-creators.

~

Thanks for reading — I hope some of it made sense at least. If not: get yourself a copy of Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake and take a look at this marvellous world from a myco-centric perspective.

Postscript: Entangled Happiness Networks

People’s happiness depends on the happiness of others with whom they are connected.

I can’t believe I forgot to include the most obvious piece of research in last week’s newsletter about how our happiness is entangled with our networks.

Clusters of happy and unhappy people are visible in the network, and the relationship between people’s happiness extends up to three degrees of separation (for example, to the friends of one’s friends’ friends). … This provides further justification for seeing happiness, like health, as a collective phenomenon.

Read more:

• Dynamic spread of happiness in a large social network: longitudinal analysis over 20 years in the Framingham Heart Study (The British Medical Journal)
• Happiness spreads like the plague (New Scientist)