Stop Judging You: A New Forest Story

Congratulations, you have met your activity goal!

Happy Friday!

And a warm welcome from the Palace, where, last night, I saw a fox curled up on a stone gate post outside number thirteen.

His big head startled as I approached. Animal eyes looking into mine, first jumpy, then wary, then, after a minute, sleepy.

He tucked his big head into his fluffed fur and fell back asleep, perched on his pillar, outside number thirteen.

For those of you new around these parts, welcome 👋 My name is David and I’m a writer, outdoor instructor, cyclist-at-large with Thighs of Steel and Expeditions Manager at British Exploring Society.

In this newsletter, I write stories that help you and me understand the world (and ourselves) a little better.

Sometimes I am awed by wild in the city.

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Stop Judging You: A New Forest Story

On New Year’s Eve Eve, I walked clean across the New Forest, from Sway in the south to Ashurst in the east.

It was my first long hike in months, testing an ankle that had been swollen and sore, inflamed from August to December. God bless the osteopath!

You’d think that, being my first long hike in months, I would take it easy. For some explicable reason, I didn’t.

18km in five hours.

This story is about the all-too-explicable reason I turned this adventure into a forced march — and what I did next, twenty-four hours later.

A Bad Idea

After what felt like a bald few months of hopping and hobbling, I was determined to Do Something over the Christmas holiday.

This is called goal-setting and — spoiler alert — it is only ambiguously a good thing.

Nevertheless, my goal was to do what I call a Defined Adventure. I wanted to plan to hike from A to B and then I wanted to do the hike from A to B.

Plan: A to B.

Or at least I thought that was what I wanted.

As I said: goal-setting is only ambiguously a good thing.

Goal-setting is part of the doing mindset, a productive space where humans fix problems and stress out. Not necessarily what I needed at a reflective time of year such as New Year’s Eve Eve.

So sometimes goals are bad ideas to have, especially when, compounding the calamity, we stick to the damn things.

So What Went Wrong?

On the surface: nothing. I hiked for 18km without incident, without getting lost, without ankle pain, without even a proper lunch.

And that, pretty much, sums up what went wrong.

I called this hike a Defined Adventure — but what kind of an adventure is it when you don’t even have lunch?

Etymologically buried at the heart of the word ‘adventure’ is the idea of chancing your luck and taking a risk.

There was no risk on my Trans-Forest Trail, only — for that explicable reason — a deep anxiety of leaving A behind and whithering my ass to B.

And so we reach our explicable reason. Or perhaps I should say reasons plural.

Doing When I Need Being 🤔

Picture the scene. It’s New Year’s Eve Eve and you’re on your first hike in months, somewhere you love — like the New Forest.

It’s one of those tail-end days where the ground is soft, the air is sharp and the herons are doing good business.

It looks a bit like this:

A tree stand in a Scots Pine on Ober Heath

I climbed to the top of the tree stand you can see in the picture, a slippery climb into the Scots Pine, for an owl’s eye across the land.

These tree stands are used by gamekeepers for good shot at deer. There’s a sign telling me not to climb, but it’s New Year’s Eve Eve so I don’t care.

It’s still enough that I can hear the rustle of waterproof trousers a kilometer away.

I take stock. I look out over Fletchers Thorns to the dark silhouettes of Queen Bower.

I check my watch.

I check my phone.

I check my fucking Oura ring.

Even though I’m only halfway through my first hike in months, I can feel there’s something not right here.

I’m doing when I need being.

How the hell has it come to pass that I am measuring this hike on three different devices?

I’m doing when I need being.

My watch says I’ve done 8km. My phone says I’ve done 8km. My fucking Oura ring says I’ve done 8km — and is giving me top marks for activity today. Congratulations, you have met your activity goal!

I’m getting praise from a band of metal round my finger. I don’t feel good.

I’m doing when I need being.

All these devices — they only measure doing.

My fucking Oura ring grades me on 54 metrics, from Average Resting Heart Rate to Temperature Trend Deviation. But it doesn’t matter how many sensors they add, there’s no device on Earth that measures being.

It’s New Year’s Eve Eve. I’m doing when I need being.

And it’s giving me a headache.

Muscle-Through Adventures

An adventure isn’t an adventure if you know the outcome in advance. Today, in the Forest, I knew the outcome in advance.

I had 18km of Forest to wade through; my job was to follow my phone and beat out the steps, each one logged in triplicate on my doing devices — three!

It meant I could ‘muscle through’ the so-called adventure: suck up the foot-pounding, suck up the headaches, keep my eyes on the horizon and shift it.

Today’s hike was more like the successful completion of a half marathon, only without the cheering supporters, samba band and tinpot medal.

I could’ve had a bigger adventure in Asda.

Not an Asda in sight. But, if you peer closely, you might see a heron.

A Fallacy

One of the classic markers of being is losing track of time and, on a very simple level, it’s hard to lose track of time when I’m wearing a watch. Especially one — three! — that are specifically and perniciously measuring my every step.

With these devices it’s like I’m constantly looking over my own shoulder. Constantly monitoring myself. Not trusting myself to be alive. Judging my sleep, judging my steps. Judging my beingness through my doingness. A fallacy.

When I hike to the drumbeat of doing devices — three! — I can’t help but shift into doing mode.

And doing is trying, in both senses of the word.

Stop trying.

Stop trying so hard.

Stop trying to relax.

Stop trying!

Apologies To The Forest

Okay, so I got New Year’s Eve Eve wrong in a few ways.

• I thought I wanted Defined Adventure; I didn’t. Nothing wrong with Defined Adventures. Nothing wrong with doing mode. But I needed being, not doing.

• 18km is too far for me to do much more than muscle through. (Especially after I realised I could get home before dark to see friends. Tick off those miles!)

• Measuring a hike on three devices is a bit much. (In my defence, before you think I’m a complete monster, I was testing one of the devices. Even so: measuring a pleasure hike on even one device might be a bit much.)

• I didn’t bring lunch. What WAS I thinking?!

But perhaps worst of all is that I hired the Forest to collude in my doing, sold out nature for productivity and bribed ecology to dress the scene of my accomplishments.

And that kinda goes against everything I learned in 2024 .

So, the next day, New Year’s Eve, I went back to the Forest to apologise.

The Wind Gave Me A Playful Shove

I didn’t really have time to be going into the Forest. It was New Year’s Eve and I’d spent most of the day writing to you.

But I had a couple of hours before meeting friends (👋) at the Malaysian street food restaurant down by the station so I put my foot down.

There were a few other cars still parked in the darkness at Cadnam’s Pool. A family picked their way along the sandy shore, dogs weaving between skinny legs in welly boots.

I switched off my headlights and let my eyes grow into the early starlight. I enjoyed the power of the wind, pushing and shoving at the car bonnet, riffling waves over the water.

I watched the family round up their dogs and clank their wellies free of mud. I waited for their taillights to disappear down the track. I got out of my car. The wind gave me a playful shove.

I turned away from the pool and walked into Anses Wood, scuffing up leaves and storm-shaken debris with my boots, stumbling in the gloom.

Hoooo — a tawny owl called around me in stereo — huhuhuhooo. It felt like an ambivalent welcome: ‘So you’re back,’ the owl observed. Their unseen glare was suspicious: ‘Are you ready to be here now?’

My heart leapt up like the family dog and I grabbed a branch from the Forest floor, feeling the scratch-caress of its rough-smooth bark.

Enjoying its reassuring heft in my hand, I hurled the dead branch into the air and caught it, neatly.

Pleased with my body’s no-brain instinctive deftness, I threw the branch over and over, spinning cartwheels in the night, and catching over and over like a sylvan circus performer.

Then I began to run, I don’t know where. I ran out of the woods and onto a smooth grassy trail, lit by the moon. The grass knew me and I fell down to meet it, rolling in my waterproofs, rolling like a log, like a scratching dog, embodying the animal play-feel of the ground all over.

Playtime over, I marched down Freeworms Hill, heading towards Queen North Wood, feet sinking into boggy ground. I didn’t know where I was going, but I knew this was where I must go.

I came to a fallen birch, a mighty tree laid low, and knew I must rest here.

The silvery light of the silvery moon met the silvery bark of the silvery birch.

I clambered onto the fallen birch from the rootstock end and then, monkey-style, tail up, all-foured along the mossy trunk to where a branch curled into the sky.

Here I rested, my back against the vertical branch, my legs stretched out along the trunk, my body sinking into the inch-thick moss. My head angled to the stars and I closed my eyes as a light rain began to fall.

Afterword: Farewell Oura

I lived for five and a half months with my fucking Oura ring.

In short, my conclusions chime with my experience of the Zoe Personalised Nutrition programme: an interesting short-term experiment, if you can afford it. I emphasise the word short-term. No technology will ever surpass our own sense of interoception.

That’s not to say that the £300 I dunked on the Oura told me nothing. I came back with two firm conclusions:

1. I sleep well. Even when I sleep badly, it doesn’t mean I have a bad day and I easily make up the rest I need. I’m lucky.

2. I feel good when I get outside and move at least three times a day.

The next day, the first of the new year, I removed my Oura ring and went for a run. An unmeasured, ungraded, unsanctioned run. For the sheer hell of it.

I haven’t missed the ring.

~

Apologies for the long break between newsletters: I needed this story to be the next one I published and, as you have seen, it morphed into a long one.

For those of you eager for a more regular publication schedule — bless your woolly socks — rest assured that I have a couple drafted and ready to launch, firework style, into your inboxes soon.

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Three Tiny Big Things

1. Ants vs. humans

The literally tiny vs. the literally big.

People stand out for individual cognitive abilities while ants excel in cooperation.

2. Comedy Wildlife Awards

Finalists from the 2024 Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards competition.

3. Homelessness is solvable

In 2020, practically no-one was sleeping rough on a given night in Finland.

While there is no OECD-wide average against which to compare Finland’s homeless rate of 0.08%, other countries with similarly broad definitions of homelessness provide points of reference, such as neighbouring Sweden (0.33%) or the Netherlands (0.23%).

In the UK, that figure is about 0.50%, or higher. That’s 354,000 people in England alone — more than the population of Leicester.

Can you imagine living without a home?

You shouldn’t have to. No one should. Homelessness is a systems issue.

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Thank You

Huge thanks to all the paying subscribers who helped make this story possible. You know who you are. Thank you. 💚

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As always, thank you for your eyeballs and thanks for your support.

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