The Warrior Emotion
Life is out there, waiting for you to hold up your hand and step forward
Happy Friday Saturday!
And a warm welcome from the very same attic where younger me first learnt how to walk on Dartmoor.
Apologies for the late running of this service: I can see Saturday publishing becoming de rigueur now I’m working full time.
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 now, officially, Expeditions Manager at British Exploring Society.
If you’re wondering what British Exploring Society do:
Our mission is to grow and celebrate a diverse, inclusive community of young people with the skills, resilience and determination to make lasting positive decisions in their own lives, and to deliver community benefit and positive environmental change.
They / we do this by leading 16-25 year olds out into the wilderness. This year, the Young Explorers are currently in or recently returned from Georgia, Iceland, the Cairngorms and the Outer Hebrides.
Next year, I’ll be managing those expeditions.
In the meantime, in this newsletter, I write stories that help you and me understand the world (and ourselves) a little better.
Sometimes I can’t believe how lucky I am to have this job.
Two Rules For Life
I couldn’t help it: my ears twitched. That’s what they do when people say things like:
I’ve only got two rules for life…
They’ve got my attention: I’m listening.
I’m halfway through my Gold National Navigation Award, a two-day combined training and assessment, on Dartmoor with the excellent Baz Thomas from Crag2Mountain.
There’s only two of us on the course: me and Steve1, in his mid-sixties, who’s sitting opposite me at an outside table at Fox Tor Cafe, telling me his rules for life.
‘Rule Number One: Take Part’
Steve lost his mum when he was ten. The shock of grief at such a pivotal moment in his young development could easily have sent him into hiding.
Instead, at a time when the only care plan for bereaved children was GOBSUL2, Steve joined the Scouts.
The Scouts is many different things to many different people, but one thing is compulsory for all: taking part.
So Steve took part.
He made friends, he earned his badges, he went on expeditions, then he led expeditions, led the troop — taking part, and so living, all the way through.
Life is out there, waiting for you to hold up your hand and step forward. Politics, society, humanity, ecology — we all need you to take part.
‘Rule Number Two: It’s Not About You’
For most of his career, Steve worked as an accountant in big finance. He was good at it, and successful.
Unfortunate, then, that it was ‘so much bullshit’ — people chasing status, showing off their money, thinking their self-worth had anything to do with their expensive cars and even more expensive properties.
Not long after his fortieth birthday, Steve suffered a stroke.
During his recovery, Steve’s four kids got together with his wife and issued an three-fold ultimatum. Steve must:
Change jobs;
Move to the seaside;
Get a dog.
Steve got a job in the civil service ✅, moved to Guernsey ✅ and he hates the dog3 ✅
He now works as head of finance for St John Ambulance and, for the first time in his career, he is working for something truly meaningful.
(Steve can’t believe it’s taken him this long to discover his vocation, but that’s another story.)
All employees at St John Ambulance have to serve time as volunteers so that they understand what it means to save a life.
Because it’s not about Steve. He’s just the finance guy.
Delete The Internet [🚀UPDATE]
I still don’t have a browser on my phone. Nothing bad continues to happen.
And I’ve survived three weeks without Whatsapp on my phone. Kind of…
Late on Wednesday night, flushed with digital detox success, I decided to push my Whatsapp experiment further — so I deleted my entire chat history.*
All text, all photos, all voice notes, everything that anyone had ever sent me, going all the way back to 2020 — 3.7gb of love and tears — gone.
Forever.
A totally empty chat — ah — the liberation!
All that noise — gone.
The only indication that anything, any word, any communication, any connection, had ever existed between me and another human being was a gnomic placeholder:
Waiting for this message. This may take a while.
Bliss.
~
*Ahem. Okay: confession. This wasn’t the intentional experiment I might have implied.
The cataclysmic disaster happened when I was idly trying to restore my chat history from a Google Drive backup.
It transpires that:
Restoring messages from a backup is only possible during the initial setup after (re-)installing Whatsapp. There is no way to restore messages within the app itself.
Google Drive overwrites old Whatsapp backups whenever a new one is triggered. There is no way to recover old backups. 😱
Having not done (1), I accidentally did (2).
3.7gb of life data gone.
Forever.
But after punching cushions, gnashing teeth and wailing woes, I got over it. Nothing bad happened. I haven’t actually lost anything. My Whatsapp is not my memory.
Life is short. Losing my entire Whatsapp history was always going to happen anyway. Big deal it’s happened now.
(Side note: I can’t take any credit for this wholesome big picture perspective. It’s what Cesca said to comfort me in the immediate aftermath. But it took at least twenty-four hours for my post-traumatic flashbacks to subside and for me to accept that she’d been right all along. 💙)
Three Tiny Big Things
1. Hope: The Warrior Emotion
From 2022, Nick Cave makes the case for hope and believing in human beings: The Red Hand Files and on YouTube.
Hopefulness is not a neutral position […] It is adversarial. It is the warrior emotion that can lay waste to cynicism.
Each redemptive or loving act, as small as you like, […] such as reading to your little boy, or showing him a thing you love, or singing him a song, or putting on his shoes, keeps the devil down in the hole.
2. Doing Jigsaw Puzzles Is SO HARD
Having offered mild assistance to the successful completion of a 1000-piece jigsaw earlier this week, I am in awe of almost everything in this video.
But what struck me immediately was something easily overlooked: dexterity is a freakin’ miracle.
3. COME ON EXPEDITION!
Fancy coming on expedition with British Exploring Society next year?
Applications are now open for all kinds of leadership roles for people with all kinds of different skills and backgrounds:
Social Leader 🧸
Knowledge Leader 🔬
Adventure Leader 🥾 (This is the only one that requires Mountain Leader training)
Basecamp Manager 👩🍳
Medical Leader 🩺
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.
Big love,
dc:
Not his real name.
Good Ol’ British Stiff Upper Lip
Don’t worry — he’s only kidding.