Pointy sticks and moving slow

 Recent conversations with a friend have reopened a world that has been a recurring theme throughout my life, and one that I've neglected a little in the last couple of years. It also led me to think again about why I gave up archery and what I lost when I gave it up.

My introduction to the bendy stick was via target shooting, and the meditative focus that gave me. Over time running gave me more of that focus and better, and I moved to field archery. For a few years my weekends were 'a day in the woods with a bow and a day of running on the hills'.

I finally abandoned archery when the club I'd been a member of changed into something I could no longer tolerate. The last straw was the arrival in the woods of a catering grade gas hotplate to enable the mass production of fried sandwiches. I quit in frustration and disgust that the universal human approach to 'improving' something is to destroy it and build something else there instead.

My archery days were almost always solo, occasionally with one of a small number of people who got what I was about. I'd spend the whole day doing circuits of the 26 acre course, moving to each target in turn. I'd look for edibles in the woods, watch the kites overhead and the deer grazing. Often I'd have to stop and look for lost arrows. Occasionally I'd be sitting in the woods and see a stoat or (once) a weasel. Often I'd be there until and after dark, even in summer.

It was often frustrating, I'd break and lose arrows all the time (I'm a crappy shot). But I still got something out of it that I never got back.  The point was it was slow. I'd be several minutes at each target, then more time looking for arrows. Looking for arrows meant poking around the undergrowth, clambering under trees away from the path, looking closely at the ground.

For someone who runs as much and as far as I do, slowing down isn't always easy. Archery used to force me to do it, now I need to do it more consciously.