chopping trees causes testosterone to surge

Latest from New Scientist: playing soccer and chopping trees can cause 30% surges in testosterone. It seems the baseline quantity of testosterone is less important than the activity that brings it forth. Also it seems that once you remove depressed and obese men from the smple testosterone drops a negligible amount over one's life. 80 year old men show the same surges - if they are fit- as men in their 30s.

The Open Source Walking Project and the TAZ

The internet enables large numbers of people to contribute to a project without top down management. We have seen it with computing, mainly, but the idea can be applied to many things. In conversations with various friends including Rich Lisney, of Bimbler fame, the following has emerged.

I have long been intrigued with the idea of long distance walks. I’ve done, or half done, a few official ones: Cleveland Way, Ridgeway, Mackenzie Way, GR10, GR65. However, despite the fun of doing an established walk, it is more challenging to design your own long distance walk. And then name it and pepper the stiles/trees/fence posts with little circular walking arrow signs, produce a guide book/web site and encourage others to walk your walk. 

Ideally people who live near to each section of the walk will get the directions from the web site and walk their section. They will add signs and wear down paths to indicate the way. (The way should probably follow existing paths or rights of way). The more people who walk your route the better it will become as people will make improvements and label them with signs they have downloaded or bought from the website.

In the past, creating a long distance walk was a huge project requiring a lot of top down administration. Now it can happen almost instantly, and painlessly. Once the idea is out there anyone can start walking sections straight away.

No doubt some people will object- that always happens- but the people on the ground for that section will deal with these objections not the website operators whose role is simply to inspire and inform a thousand walkers to take up their bedrolls and boots and head out there, criss-crossing the planet with myriad new trails.

I think it is time to update the concept of the temporary autonomous zone -TAZ- which has seen its greatest recent development in the festival field. The TAZ, briefly, is an idea by anarchistic thinker Hakim Bey, that states that true and authentic interactions are only possible in situations that are not monitored and weighed down by government interference, red tape, officiousness, pettiness, routine. Parties, raves and festivals are obvious examples of TAZs. But with the internet, which makes a TAZ so easy to organise, comes the burden of unofficialdom, which occurs more and more at festivals these days. Burning Man was cool when it was a few hundred, but 25,000 people off their heads? Too successful for their own boots? Maybe; or it could be the bandwagon effect, now the routinemeisters and dull badgers have leapt aboard the festival bus, using the internet to plan and monitor their events I’ve seen a creeping sense of boredom/ ‘they’ world bullshit/officiousness seep into festivals of all colour and stripe.

As always a wake-up call to move on, the real bus never halts forever. The new and viable option for a TAZ, which uses the internet effectively without being strangled by it, is the creation of instant long distance walks, the MORE the BETTER. Out walking with your friends, doing something bigger than just a ramble but still something with some vitality and genuine lifeforce about it, the open source walking project suggests a new direction for sustained grass roots activity immune from the vampiric attentions of those who seek to control...

living in the future

1.   Telling the future reminds me of something from aikido. If you extend your arm and ask someone to pull down on your wrist it is not hard for them to manage. But then imagine and visualise as best you can your arm as over thirty feet long and resting at the end on a wall. Now when they pull down on your wrist their pull is well before your imagined centre of weakness. In fact it is as if someone was pulling on your bicep, right close to the near end of your arm. And imagining the other end as resting on a wall also changes what you accept- you don’t accept they can pull it down- and to counter this you change the way you stand. You MAKE the visualisation come true.

Whilst it is true that you cannot make ANYTHING come true, one thing is certain- when you have an engraved image in your mind’s eye you a) tend to see it everywhere and b) attempt to make reality conform to this image. Therein lies the success of such programs as ‘The Secret’- which offer the tantalising prospect of a world that conforms to subjective desire- as long as you believe hard enough. It reminds me of when, aged 8, I left a stocking out pinned to my bed, in the summer to ‘test’ whether Jesus answered prayers…sadly, I reproved myself for not believing hard enough... But the 'belief' is merely a tool for making the visualisation clearer- just repeating your desire regularly like a mantra is enough- you will begin to adjust things in your life to make that desire come true...of course it may not be what you need even if it is what you want.

If we visualise the future strongly enough we make countless small moves to make such a belief congruent with our daily lives. As in the aikido move we adjust our posture. It becomes a posture that not only anticipates the future we have visualised but encourages it, and sure enough it becomes the future.

Art and fiction are one form of imagining. We have grown used to science fiction anticipating future products. Facial recognition software is straight out of big brother. Even our cars look like those in Total Recall and Robocop now. 

The Burj Khalifa building in Dubai astonishes because it doesn’t just look sci-fi (1930s New York skyscrapers did that) it looks ALIEN- like something off a Klingon planet or the bad guys in Enders Game. But the future is always changing, or, rather, our view of it which in turns becomes the future. We’re not at the centre anymore, we’ve lost the controls, it’s all up for grabs- so why not make it alien? Alien seems more likely. People queue to have tea in the café near the top of the Burj. Very definitely living in the future.

podcast about RED NILE

If you have an urgent or even rather casual interest in my book Red Nile there is podcast at Scottish Book Trust- an interview I did in the stacks of Glasgow library. Click here

Chalke Valley festival

I am appearing at Chalke Valley literary festival the evening of Friday 27th June.

I am also at Edinbrugh Literary festival 13th August.

Get tickets now before they run out.

excellent article by Olive Burkeman

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/jun/21/attention-factor-oliver-burkeman-this-column-change-your-life

Adventurers who want to be looked after

Being looked after. There is an excellent book by psychoanalyst Arthur Deikman called The Wrong Way Home. In it he talks about how ‘cult behaviour’ is really the extrapolation and realisation of the desire to be looked after, a manifestation of that childhood sense of family security when you are being driven late at night and you’re all cosy drowsing on the back seat while Mum and Dad sit in the front effortlessly whisking you home.

Wake up and smell the coffee instead! No one is going to look after you like your parents- and for very good reason. Wanting to be looked after, beyond the usual requirements of childhood or extreme illness, is one the most damaging desires in the world.

Extreme stuff. Damaging because wanting to be looked after makes people vote for tyrants, take jobs with bullies, do work they hate, live with men or women who abuse them, and do nothing when the thing looking after them exacts a huge and unwarranted price: such as asking you to serve in a murderous army, or turn a blind eye to civilian disappearances. It is a commonplace, perhaps, to assert that leaders aren’t the problem, followers are. What if Hitler had been ignored, left as a man spouting racist claptrap in a tramp’s hostel? He was made dangerous by the followers he was able to attract. Instead of ignoring or ridiculing him people imagined he could look after them.

One reason the West is inferior to the East, is that in the West people are encouraged by many of society’s institutions to want to be looked after. We encourage people to imagine that this is even possible. Don’t get me wrong, I am not suggesting we shouldn’t look after people, but we need to be able to do it without infecting ourselves with the desire to be looked after as well.

There is a traditional story about a man who watched a limbless fox living in a small cave near a water hole. Whenever a lion brought his kill there the limbless fox would wait until midnight and crawl out and eat and drink his fill. The man concluded that was all one needed to do so he sat in the market place living off whatever scraps he could find. Often he went hungry. Most of the time he was bored and depressed. But he soldiered on with his ‘limbless fox’ strategy. Finally God spoke to him- “why be a limbless fox when you can be a lion?”

One man who appeared to live the life of a lion was Freddy Spencer Chapman – mountaineer, explorer and WW 2 hero. While still at Cambridge he took part in expeditions to Greenland. He climbed in the Alps and the Himalayas, making a first ascent of the 7326metre peak Jomolhari in 1937; a peak which wasn’t ascended again until 1970. When WW2 started in the far east he was in his mid thirties and elected to be part of a group who would stay behind enemy lines and harass the Japanese. He managed this for three and a half years, spending 17 days once in a malaria induced coma. At one point he was actually captured by the Japanese, but employing his theory that escape becomes exponentially harder the longer you leave it he broke away the night he was captured, literally running away through the jungle with only his shirt on his back.

There was no question that Spencer Chapman was a hero and yet even he wanted to be looked after. His fatal flaw was a fear of financial ruin. He eschewed the life of an explorer after WW2 for that of a schoolmaster and later Warden of a residential hall at Reading University. However, when he was due to retire worries about financial security drove him to take his own life. Though he feared he might have cancer this was found to be untrue. And many accounts substantiate the fact that he was worried about not being able to survive on his pension- which was small but perfectly adequate. Bizarrely and tragically his final note expressed his desire to ‘not be an invalid’- he pessimistically assumed he would become one. Chapman wanted to be looked after financially; he sensed this was wrong and this became perverted into a delusion of being a burden when this was simply not the case. There is no question that if Chapman had been given a generous pension or had been allowed to work until he died that he would never have killed himself. It was his inability to believe that he could look after himself that drove him to take drastic action. He was like the man starving in the market place rather than taking control of his life.

Oddly enough this pattern is not unusual- both Peter Fleming and Wilfred Thesiger lived at home with their mothers, whilst Bill Tillman lived with his sister- looked after while they planned their next big adventure. In a sense some explorers are really still like boys, with a hypertrophic sense of adventurous self-reliance but an underdeveloped sense of social self-reliance. For some ordinary life is just too dull to be taken seriously. But I suspect a big part of it is a failure to root out once and for all that warm and cosy desire to be looked after…