Hi

This time last week, I was crossing the finish line of the For Rangers Ultramarathon.

It was 5 days, running 230km across 5 different conservancies in Kenya.

Before talking about some lessons from this, I wanted to shamelessly plug sponsorship.

I've set the ambitious target of raising £3.5k before May and hope you might think this run worthy of maybe a fiver…

Sponsorship is a weird thing. Just because I've now done it, does that mean I now can't ask retrospectively?

It often feels like that.

Bizarre, but that's human nature.

Anyway - I'll leave a link at the bottom of this email.

TIA - Thanks In Advance!

(Or This Is Africa)

My time in Kenya was fantastic.

Visiting a place that's literally saturated with the most famous, beautiful and deadly animals is a rare privilege - and I hope everyone gets to enjoy it some time.

The last two weeks have made me think a lot about happiness.

1. I was happier than usual.

2. The other runners seemed happier than usual.

3. The Kenyans I interacted with seemed happier than the Brits I interacted with.

I wonder why…

For the runners, our days looked like this:

-Sleeping in cold, rustle-y, snore-y, 50-person tents in army camp beds.

-Waking up at 5am each day to gag 1,000kcals of oats down our throats before the sun rose.

-Popping and taping blisters.

-Getting any morning hygiene done.

-Packing up all our sleeping kit, meds, food, clothes and water into a pack.

-Then hobbling our tired, sore and ever-so-tight legs to the start line to run approximately a marathon.

Just to get in and do it all again.

And yet.

I've never heard so much laughter.

Truly, from before sunrise to well after sunset.

Why?

One thought is that we were temporarily moving ourselves back down Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.

The hierarchy is basically a ladder of human needs: at the bottom are things like food, water, warmth and safety. Then come things like belonging and esteem.

At the top sits 'self-actualisation' - the rather grand idea of fulfilling your potential and becoming the person you're capable of being.

At the bottom, life is pretty simple.

-Am I safe?

-Am I warm?

-Have I eaten?

-Where am I sleeping tonight?

As you move up the pyramid, the questions get harder.

-Am I fulfilled?

-Am I doing something meaningful?

-Am I living the right life?

-Am I reaching my potential?

And there's the rub.

We were, in the purest sense, just humans BEING.

That week, we had one objective: get through the day and complete the race as best we could.

Most of us were resigned to leaving phones off, avoiding work emails and forgetting about whatever was happening on Instagram.

Our happiness wasn't primarily from hedonic pleasure.

It came from simplicity.

It came from a shared goal.

And, no doubt, it came from community.

The only time you were really on your own was a brief 5-minute shower and bathroom trip.

Compare that to most of our lives in the Western world.

We sleep in our own rooms, in our own houses, with our own WFH setups.

We can filter our environment so much that, even on a train of 1,000 people, our AirPods can create a solitary little world.

And I wonder whether this is one of the strange consequences of living comfortable lives.

The better we get at satisfying our basic needs, the more abstract our problems become.

At some point, nobody is asking whether you have enough food.

They're asking whether they should take the promotion, leave their relationship, start a business, join a drama class or finally do something about the vague feeling that they're not quite living the life they're supposed to be living.

Brian from Sales isn't struggling to find water.

He's struggling to work out what he actually wants.

And unlike hunger or cold, there's no obvious finish line.

You can't tick 'self-actualisation' off a list.

You can spend years trying to become a better, happier, more fulfilled version of yourself and still have absolutely no idea whether you're doing it right.

Perhaps that's why self-actualisation can feel so lonely??

The needs at the bottom of the pyramid are shared.

The ones at the top are increasingly personal.

There were 50 of us in those tents, all complaining about the same sore legs, eating the same disgusting oats and counting down to the same finish line.

It was incredibly easy to know what mattered and to connect with each other over pain, frustration and fatigue.

I'm not sure I've worked out what the lesson is yet.

I don't think the answer is to deliberately make our lives harder, or to pretend that modern comforts are bad.

I quite like hot showers.

But I do wonder whether there's something useful in occasionally stepping back down the pyramid.

-Go camping.

-Leave your phone at home.

-Run until your biggest problem is a blister.

-Spend a day outside.

And notice how quickly a hot shower, a warm bed, a decent meal or simply sitting around with people you like becomes more than enough.

It can be easy to “Goggins” it and go alone: but that’s a waste of an opportunity to connect.

I'm hoping the afterburn from this race lasts a little while.

That I can remember how grateful I felt for things that normally don't even register as luxuries.

And perhaps that's the only conclusion I have for now:

There might not be an obvious way to 'win' at self-actualisation.

But there might be something to be said for occasionally remembering how little we actually need to be happy.

Cliche - but often these real lessons are.

Fancy helping those less fortunate than you? The cost of a round of Guinn-i at the pub goes so much further for the Rangers sleeping out in the wild day and night.

Thanks so much!

https://fundraising.savetherhino.org/fundraisers/Milbz/london-marathon

Be well.

J