SPECIAL EDITION - If I Could Just Get It on Paper
Connecting the Dots
Twelve years of my own footsteps, and the thing that changed everything was not the thing I have been telling people.
Simple words can become clever phrases, and chapters could turn into books. Yes, if I could just get it on paper — but it's harder than it ever looks. — Jimmy Buffett, 1982
Yesterday I walked twenty miles in the mountains. I am sixty-five.
This morning my legs were fine.
That is not a boast. It is a question.
I've been trying to get it on paper for about fifteen years.
First it was going to be a book. The Earthway Primer. Then a network — I bought the domain, built the site, and waited for people to come. Then these letters.
Each time the same idea. I have learned something out here about living close to the ground, and I ought to be able to write it down so it is of use to somebody else.
Each time, harder than it ever looked.
I think I finally know why.
I kept trying to write the conclusions before I had finished the study.
What I asked this morning
I have been building software. It is called the Earthway Lodge, it runs on my own Mac, and it does one simple thing: it keeps my record. Sleep, steps, blood work, journals, my own books. Nothing goes to anybody's cloud. There is no account, because there is no server.
So I asked it something I have wondered about for years.
Has my sleep actually got better, or do I only think it has?
I remembered waking at three in the morning and lying there for hours. I remembered that happening less lately. But memory is a poor witness about sleep. You are unconscious for the part you are trying to recall.
So we went and looked. Export after export, each reaching further back, until there were 1,026 nights and 4,271 days of walking, going back to 2014.
Twelve years of a life, in numbers, sitting there the whole time.
What twelve years said
Sweden — Leksand. 2,890 steps a day.
Romania, the garden at Șomartin. 5,787.
Sibiu, since last November. 10,124.
Seven years of my life between fifteen hundred and four thousand steps a day.
Every summer would lift a little. Every October would take it back. October of 2020: twelve hundred and eighty-one steps a day.
That is a man walking from one room to another.
I would have told you the change began when I moved to Romania. That is the story I have been telling. The data says otherwise.
November and December of 2021 went up, and stayed up. The two darkest months of a Swedish year. Nothing else in seven years did that.
That was the autumn my daughter started school.
That was me, walking her there.
Four years later — the day before I wrote this — I walked thirty-two kilometres in a day. Eleven hundred metres up and the same coming back down: about thirty-six hundred feet each way. At sixty-five.
It started with a four-year-old and a school run.
I did not know that until this afternoon.
The part I am not proud of
Halfway through, I had a beautiful theory.
Three months lined up perfectly. Walking went up, sleep got better. Walking went down, sleep got worse. Walking went back up, and it was the best month on record.
Three for three. I could feel the article writing itself.
Then we tested it against all twenty-one months, and it fell apart. One month in particular broke it flat — I was walking a normal amount and sleeping worse than in any month of the previous four years.
Three points in a row is a story. Twenty-one points is a measurement.
If I had stopped at three, I would have written down walking fixes my sleep — and the next bad stretch, I would have blamed myself for not walking enough.
A machine that only tells you what you hoped is not worth owning.
The soil keeps regenerating. But it does not do it because you wanted it to.
The fence at the top
There is a doctor I watched this week, Tessa Damm, who spent ten years in intensive care. She describes the job as standing at the bottom of a cliff with an ambulance. After a while, she says, you stop asking how to build a better ambulance and start asking why nobody put a fence at the top.
The fence has to go up during the years when nothing is wrong.
That is the whole problem. Nobody is measuring you then. Medicine measures you after you fall.
My record was being kept whether or not anyone was reading it. That is how I have a month from last year, in numbers, that I could never have described to you in words.
It was written down anyway.
It is still there.
And now the plain part
Here is where the story stops and the asking begins. I would rather mark the line than blur it.
I am looking for a few people to try this.
You would need a Mac with Apple silicon, an iPhone, and a watch or ring that tracks your health. And patience: it is not one click yet. You run a script in a Terminal window and grant a few permissions by hand. Half an hour, most of it waiting.
If a Terminal window is a reason to say no, that is a completely fair answer, and I would rather hear it now than in a fortnight.
What I need is not a bug list. I can find bugs. It is whether the numbers look believable to you, and whether the words make sense to somebody who did not build it.
earthwaylodge.com
And if you are not a tester but you have read this far — tell me what you would want your own record to answer. That costs you one line, and it is worth more to me than you would think.
Fifteen years I have been trying to get this on paper.
It turns out I was never meant to write it.
I was meant to collect it, and let it say its own piece.
Walk with me.
Mitakuye Oyasin — all relations.
— Kevin
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NOTES — not part of the post
Why this sits in Vol. 2 but not in Issues/. The Series Bible says the Muddy Way "is a series and a path, not a pitch. We are not selling the app." This one asks for testers. It breaks the rule on purpose, so it keeps the Special_ prefix and stays out of the numbered path.
The November paragraph is deliberately not written. The strongest data point in the piece — worst month in four years, corroborated by two devices — but using it means telling readers what happened on the 17th. As it stands it says "one month in particular broke it flat" and no more. Kevin's to add, any time, and it will land hard when he does.
The angel ask is not here and should not be. Testers and money in the same letter turns the first ask into a pretext. See _System/Planning/Finding_an_Angel.md.
Sources for every number: 05_Notes_and_Journal/Studies/the-twelve-year-record/ — the step eras, the sleep months, the r = −0.24, and the working out behind all of it.
Corrections made in drafting, recorded because the habit is the point: - The range was written as Făgăraș. It was the Cindrel Mountains. Invented detail, caught by Kevin before publication. - Frumoasa peak, 2,244 m, 1.5 km from Cindrel peak — true, and cut. It is a hiker talking to a hiker, and this piece is for people who do not know where Sibiu is.