The Art Of Understanding Can Be Hard To Understand

What does the above statement mean to me, simple, through experience our views, opinions and perspectives change, and in them doing so we learn. If they don't change then you aren't learning anything, even when you think you're really knowledgeable on a subject and considered an "Expert", believe it or not, there's still more to learn. At a certain stage along any learning process you can hit a wall, you either stay in that place because you feel safe and simply have no desire to expand your knowledge base, or you do work on opening your mind on a more panoramic level to try to move forward. Many don't climb the wall, they metaphorically stand there banging their heads into it inviting others to do the same. 

Learning a musical instrument is a great example, when you're first learning you feel like you're never going to progress from the foundational point you start at. To get over this initial hurdle you have to put the time in and practice loads, some fall straight away and there are others that break down the barriers and continue to evolve. To achieve sound learning or to "master" the art of understanding we need to be able to be honest with ourselves and not live in denial just to save face. Lazy thinking can influence others and in turn this cycle continues.

Evolving Thoughts

Where Am I Going With This?

When I read my blogs be it my fishing one, poetry and this metal detecting one I see an evolution that I didn't know was happening at the time. Through the teachings of my 'late & great' dad he told me about what he called the "the process". This is the journey we go through to achieve a desired result, he came to understand the process within most things is identical it's only the end result which is different. I've adopted this mindset in pretty much everything that I do, be it writing,  drumming, working, fishing and metal detecting.

If you go all the way back to the start of this particular blog when I first started writing it, it has quite a lot of twists and turns, the digital machines appear towards the start and slowly phase out as I discovered Nexus and other analog machines. Because I have so many analog detectors and two digital ones it gave me a great perspective on how all these machines performed on the same type of terrains. I started swinging in the fields and now I swing on both the river and the fields. This changed my perspective on machine performance and on two totally different hunting approaches. I started to perform lots of different tests above the ground, in air etc and over time, through "the process", I came to understand that these kind of tests demonstrated very little of a machines performance on targets in the ground. 

Evolution Of The Mind

My perspective on both depth and unmasking changed, I thought the Equinox 800 was deep and a good unmasker, it was only when I used Nexus that I realised it wasn't. I thought my Legend and Equinox performed great on the river until I used my Tesoro's and other analog machines. The more time I put into hunting it suddenly became clear that certain machines actually perform better in the ground than in air. This came about by testing above the dirt and actually finding stuff in it, over time patterns started to emerge that helped me come to these conclusion, none of these conclusion were arrived at by conjecture.

You can go back to my old videos and hear me say that "machines that do well above ground have a tendency to perform better in the ground". At the point I made that claim I genuinely thought that that was the truth, but it was only by going through the process and learning from experience that I came to realise that it's just not the case. All these twists and turns is what makes the journey interesting for me but I've always tried to be progressive in the things that I do and that helps.