Going The Extra Millimetre
'Nature doesn’t disdain what only lives for a day. It pours the whole of itself into each moment.'
Happy Friday!
And a warm welcome from the other side of my birthday.
While other kids were going to Pizza Hut, Coral Reef and Ice Cream Factory, I can remember at least three of my childhood birthday parties that were, in effect, long walks.
First there was the famous ‘midnight hike’ for my ninth birthday, notable for the sheer quantity of sweets consumed (and John being sick). Another year there was a treasure trail around the village, a popular format where a series of clues led our merrie band from point to point. Finally, there was the infamous orienteering challenge around Wittenham Clumps, during which Douglas got a nosebleed. It was that exciting.
All of this is to say that it’s no wonder that I’ve grown up loving outdoor adventures — treks mean treats!
For those of you new around these parts, welcome 👋 My name is David and I’m a writer, outdoor instructor and cyclist-at-large with Thighs of Steel. In this newsletter, I write stories that help you and me understand the world (and ourselves) a little better.
Sometimes I have birthdays (thank you everyone 💚).
Going The Extra Millimetre
Nature doesn’t disdain what only lives for a day. It pours the whole of itself into each moment.
~ Tom Stoppard, The Coast of Utopia
While on my birthday adventure (did I mention I had a birthday?), my girlfriend bought a coffee from a cute coffee horsebox in the woods run by what can only be called a mother, daughter and puppy triple act.
In the course of the purchase, my girlfriend (peckish) asked, ‘Is that the last almond croissant?’
‘It is,’ the mother replied.
‘Well, I’ll have the last almond croissant, then!’
The daughter chips in, complaining, ‘Normally we have loads left over and we get to eat them all weekend. Not today!’
We end up chatting for some time to the trio (and throwing a tennis ball for at least one of them), hearing stories about how the mum moved their family cafe, Puddings, from near Gdansk in Poland to Maidstone, Kent. (‘Don’t go, it’s a dump. Cafe is nice. Town is shithole.’)
Walking back to our campsite (Honeysuckle, since you ask), my girlfriend said: ‘In London, nobody talks to each other. There’s something that puts us off, we’ve got this idea that it’s this huge effort.
‘But you don’t need to make some massive gesture to connect. You just need to go the extra millimeter.’
And when we open ourselves up, just a fraction, the whole world rushes in to delight us.
But wait — there’s more!
Earlier this week, I came across* a link to an old TEDx talk. You might have watched Homework for Life by Matthew Dicks a million years ago in 2016, but you probably didn’t so allow me...
Matthew Dicks is a storyteller who, in the hunt for more story gold, started a daily spreadsheet, a five-minute journal that, very simply, captured that day’s most story-like moment.
I decided that every night before I went to bed, about eleven thirty, I’m going to sit down, reflect upon my day, and ask myself … what was the most story-like moment from my day?
Every day is unique and special. No man can step into the same river twice and all that. And, as Dicks points out, the best stories are not big dramas. They are what he calls ‘dander in the wind’, moments of vulnerable, relatable humanity that leap across the gap between brains and connect us to each other.
After a few weeks of filling in his spreadsheet, Dicks could hardly believe his luck. He’d found the secret keys to Story Town, the cheat code for Grand Theft Story, a wellspring of stories that could never run dry.
But more than that:
This project turned into magic because I discovered that […] if you sit down and honestly look for stories in your life, you […] start to see that there are stories in your life all the time.
There are moments when you connect with someone, and your heart moves, or your position on something changes, or you discover something for the first time. You also discover that there's beauty and importance in your life that you never imagined was there.
[…] You suddenly discover that you are not an unimportant person and that your days aren't meaningless. […] You'll discover that there are meaningful, life-changing moments happening to you all the time.
This is what it means to go the extra millimeter: open the door, just a crack, and you’ll discover that there are meaningful, life-changing moments happening to you all the time.
So.
What’s been your most story-like moment of today? What made today special, different from any other day?
If you had to stand up and tell a small crowd of slightly-drunk friends a five minute story from today, what story would you tell?
~
* Thanks to Paul Kix for sharing Matthew Dicks’s TEDx talk in his weekly storytelling newsletter. If you have any interest in reading or absorbing stories, then Paul Kix is your man.
Three Tiny Big Things
1. ‘Nature can still beat the machine’
2. ‘Effortless is a myth’ says whining tennis player
From Roger Federer’s Dartmouth commencement address:
People would say my play was effortless. Most of the time, they meant it as a compliment, but it used to frustrate me when they would say, “He barely broke a sweat!” Or “Is he even trying?”
The truth is, I had to work very hard to make it look easy. I spent years whining, swearing, throwing my racket, before I learned to keep my cool.
Having seen Roger Federer play in the first round at Wimbledon on an outside court way back in 1999, I can verify all three of these petulant behaviours. He lost that day in exactly the way critics said he would:
The wakeup call came early in my career, when an opponent at the Italian Open publicly questioned my mental discipline. He said, “Roger will be the favourite for the first two hours, and then I’ll be the favourite after that.”
After leading two sets to one, Federer lost in five. In fact, he lost in the first round in three of his first four visits to Wimbledon. Talent had not yet married discipline.
Fast forward a decade and I’m sitting high up on Centre Court on the last day of Wimbledon 2012, watching Federer crush Andy Murray to win his seventeenth Grand Slam title, then a men’s record. It was clear that, in the intervening years, Federer had worked quite hard.
I don’t know about you, but I’m far more comfortable whining, swearing and throwing my keyboard around than I am working hard.
3. Peregrines v. v. fast ⏩
I think I might have seen a peregrine falcon in the New Forest the other week. Maybe I did, maybe I didn’t. Either way, off the back of my possible sighting, a good friend of the show (👋) strongly recommended I read J.A. Baker’s The Peregrine:
When the hawk is not hunting, the flight may seem slow and undulating, but it is always faster than it looks. I have timed it at between thirty and forty miles an hour, and it is seldom less than that. Level pursuit of prey has reached speeds of fifty to sixty miles an hour over distances of a mile or more… The speed of the vertical stoop is undoubtedly well over a hundred miles an hour, but it is impossible to be more precise. The excitement of seeing a peregrine stoop cannot be defined by the use of statistics.
Well, J.A. Baker wrote that paragraph in the late 1960s. Since then, humans have invented better ways of clocking peregrine stoop (AKA dive) speeds.
They’ve also invented Youtube (and really intrusive dance music):
Thank You
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Big love,
dc:
