On how our hunting mode affects our perception

This may seem obvious to some people but it just became obvious to me; how you hunt affects your perception.

Lately, I have been primarily hunting on grids. I find an area I like, I grid it, and I hunt it with slow, tightly overlapped swings. I keep my coil on the soil as much as possible. I put a cover on the coil for that reason only. I wanted that extra inch of depth.
Hunting on a grid pattern the way I do takes mental fortitude. I warn you now in case you haven’t already tried hunting this way; You will want to give up really soon. You will be going along whilst your periphery vision takes in the whole unexplored terrain around you and you will have the impulse to take off at a gallop to cover it all.

I spy with my little eye endless possibilities for cool coins

But if you resist the urge to abandon your grid strategy, after a while you grow to like it. There is a Zen quality to the mind state you achieve while you slowly inch your way through an area. And that’s when your perception will change.
When I started metal detecting, I hunted many places. Some days I would try two or three different parks. I never really covered much of any of the places I hunted. I would hurry through them, judge them empty of goodies, and move along to the next spot. Soon I ran out of new places to hunt and I started feeling despair and anxiety. I felt the city was too small and there were too many other people metal detecting.
Now however, I have completely changed the way I think. Now, as I move very slowly through a site, I feel there is just too much ground to cover and that I may not have enough time left in my life to explore every park in my beautiful city. Heck, I posted not too long ago (here) about the feeling that I may not do as well next year as I did this year because I took all the silver coins out of the parks (I wish). Well, this morning, it struck me as silly to feel that way, seeing how the new spot I began exploring with my AT Pro seems enormous. I don’t think I’ll be able to completely cover it before Spring comes again.

And there you have it. Hunting a place slowly, inch by inch, in a grid pattern, will make the world seems a lot bigger.

Thank you for looking!

Tags: metal detecting theory