Season 7 Is Done! What's Next? [Part Two]

We're going in search of trees and books and an *incredible* night's sleep.

Hello again.

Hot on the heels of yesterday’s look at where Season 7 of Everything Is Amazing took us - here’s where we’re going in the next season, and during the six weeks leading up to it.

When I was a kid, I fell hopelessly in love with a children’s adventure novel my late father gave to me:

Brothers Robin, John and Harold are waiting for their parents to return from India and suffering under the stern guardianship of their Aunt Ellen - and during the Easter holidays from their boarding school, Harold catches measles.

Having missed the window for returning to school for the next term and facing the profound existential horror of spending months (months!) with Aunt Ellen, the three boys pack their bags, steal some food and their father’s rifle and some ammunition, and decide to go live in the woods as outlaws.

(At this point Robin, of course, renames himself “Robin Hood“, John as “Big John” and Harold as “Little John“.)

Hijinks naturally ensue. They build a shelter within a hollow oak tree, they eat whatever they can forage, kill & cook, and start wearing rabbit-skin coats after their clothes wear out. (I can’t remember how many rabbits this involved, but of course there’s somewhere on the Internet that calculates stuff like this, and it must be hundreds.)

After 8 months of evading capture by the fun-ruining adults of the local police force, the intrepid trio heroically turn themselves in to save the life of a loner they’ve befriended in the woods - just in time to meet their father, to explain themselves in a way that makes him proud, and presumably to celebrate with lashings of ginger beer. It’s that kind of story.

The story ends with an escaped bear they encountered earlier in the story, finding their hollow oak tree and settling into it to hibernate away the coming winter.

Brendon Chase was published in 1944, but is set in earlier, seemingly simpler times, with all the wistfulness you might expect from a book written during one of the most violent social convulsions of the 20th Century.

But it’s also a book about loneliness. 'B.B’. - his real name being Denys Watkins-Pitchford - had recently lost his 7-year-old son to Bright’s disease, and himself had a lonely childhood with no close friends. It’s a book about the power of young friendship and camaraderie, of the kind demonstrated in the real-life version of Lord Of The Flies…

And good grief, the artwork!

Watkins-Pitchford was also a professional illustrator, so…well, just look at the way he uses light and dark to…I mean, the sheer….

*rendered speechless for a while*

It’s also, of course, a book about boys and men. Note how it’s the father serving as their “reward” at the end of the story. The lip-curling implication: what, girls roaming the great outdoors? Good lord, I say, steady on old man, nobody would believe it, the fairer sex is far too feeble to endure the rigours of Nature, what?

(In these less grossly sexist times I really don’t have to offer counter-evidence here, because most of us know a thousand times over what twaddle it is. But hey - Jasmin Paris, guys!)

Nevertheless, it’s still a lovely book with a lot to teach about paying attention when you’re outdoors, giving all your senses to it, and to look and look - until, at last, you begin to *see*.

(Here’s someone else who feels the same way about it.)

Yet somehow, when I became what I laughingly refer to as an “adult”, I clean forgot about my love for Brendon Chase - including when a few years ago I returned to the tiny village in Norfolk I lived in my early teens, and slept in my bivvy bag under a tree in the exact same woods I used to dream of living in as a teen, Brendon-Chase style. I’d forgotten it all.

As I wrote about last year, nothing can lie to you like your own memory:

Nothing Lies Like Your Own Memory

Every time you remember something, it’s like a blurry photocopy of a photocopy. Your recollection of the past can be fickle & slippery. Your whole identity is standing on quicksand.

But books? Ah. Books can bring it all back. They can anchor you and bolster treasured memories, they can fact-check your emotions, and they can even overwrite your most self-deluding recent inaccuracies.

Sometimes, books can remember you better than you can.

For Season 8 of Everything Is Amazing, I’m going to be chasing these ideas in two different directions.

Here’s the first, available for all readers. (You’ll hear about the second one in a few days.)

• What is it about being “outdoors” (that peculiar human invention) that instantly feels so good and takes such a powerful hold on our imagination, in the same way islands seem to do?

• Exactly how good for us is the outdoors, scientifically speaking? What are the very real and professionally studied health benefits of being surrounded by what we think of as ‘nature’? There certainly a lot of wellness stuff bouncing around the internet that runs on smoke and vibes (and sometimes pure grift), but what about the actual, fact-checked science?

• Did you know that some healthcare providers are now offering ‘green prescriptions’? (I know this through my other half, who is running them for a local college here in Scotland and through her own newsletter.)

• While we’re at it, what about cities? Looking beyond the unhelpfully lazy “good/nature vs bad/urban” narratives, what is it about modern city life that changes people’s behaviour and even their biology, in the same way that humans successfully adapt to life at higher altitudes? What about all that intriguing research into how the walking speed of pedestrians correlates with city size a while back? How different do cities (and towns, and villages, and anywhere you can find people, or perhaps not find people) make our bodies and minds work - especially considering our evolution as social animals?

• In every sense, what do we need from our living environment, versus what we’re getting - and what can we actually do about that, in a practical, day to day sense?

I’ll be taking this terrific, bestselling book from 2017 as my starting-point…

…and then looking at everything that’s been uncovered in the years since its publication - including data collected in those dizzying years when the world went quiet and the skies cleared in ways they hadn’t for decades.

All that to come when season 8 gets underway!

But before then, paving the way towards it over the next month and a half - hey, would it be too much to ask that we can all get a good night’s sleep for a change?

Maybe you’re actually sleeping like a baby these days! If so, I’m happy for you, in a envious and slightly mean-spirited way. Bah.

But for whatever reasons, I’m not. My sleep has been disrupted for a long while now - better than it was a half-decade ago when my stress levels were as high as they’ve ever been, but still messed-up enough to leave my eyes gritty and my energy levels all over the place.

Some of this isn’t a mystery. There’s certainly a lot of anxiety-inducing things in the news - but, isn’t that more of a reason to find something to help us sleep better?

I’ve written before about how utterly catastrophic to your health being long-term sleep-deprived can be:

This Is Your Body On No Sleep

So I want to do something about it.

Something experimental. Something radical.

Something maybe even completely stupid.

As I write this possibly ill-advised words, it’s hammering down with rain outside the window of my apartment here in western Scotland. That’s certainly nothing new: this is Scotland, after all.

But the sound of the rain is reminding me of how soothing rain-noise on canvas is, when you’re sleeping snugly in a rain-lashed tent - which is exactly why modern meditation apps like Headspace and Calm have so many rain “sleepcasts” and “soundscapes” you can listen to as you doze off.

In 2017, Outside writer Erin Berger found herself in a similar situation:

“Since middle school over a decade ago, my terrible sleeping habits have manifested in various literal failures to launch. Waking up for an early-morning run is a laughable concept. I hit the snooze button, on average, four times every morning. My record is eleven. Lately, my energy has been peaking later and later. I do my best thinking and running starting around 4:30 p.m.

In my one attempt to have a consistent sleep schedule after college, I tried to be in bed by 10 p.m., but I often just ended up staring at my ceiling for hours, wondering who the hell can fall asleep in 15 to 20 minutes, which is, apparently, the average (some people can fall asleep even faster than that, per the Sleep Foundation).”

But then she tries sleeping outdoors for a while, to reset her body and mind - and it works:

“After the third restful night, I abandoned my sleep anxieties and started evangelizing: “My sleep has been amazing,” I told anyone unfortunate enough to ask how the experiment was going. “I think my circadian rhythm is already changing. You can just feel it, you know?”

Having drank the melatonin-spiked Kool-Aid, I unzipped my sleeping bag on day four, feeling like a whole new, clearheaded woman. I could probably go without my morning coffee (I told myself while drinking my morning coffee.) But I did drop the urge to have a cup at 2 p.m.; in fact, I genuinely felt chipper all day.”

I mean - that sounds really great, right?

So I’m having a go, in my own nerdy way.

Despite it increasingly being the worst time to sleep outdoors in
Scotland (😬), I’m going to spent the next 6 weeks putting myself through a mixture of outdoor sleeps and science-led experiments in order to find what works, at least for me, for getting a full night of blessed oblivion … and I’ll be writing the whole thing up, newsletter by newsletter, for all paying subscribers to Everything Is Amazing.

To be clear, I’m looking for things that can be adapted to work anywhere, not just in a tent. And everything I learn along the way, I’ll be passing along to you, in the hope it unlocks the good night’s sleep you desperately need and richly deserve, wherever you are in the world.

Sound good?

If you’re currently a free reader and want to join this science mini-adventure, you can become a paid supporter here, with a 20% discount that’s only running for the next 4 days:

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Thanks so much for reading! I can’t wait to get started.

- Mike