Ever taken a photo of a scene where someone is standing with their back to the camera, looking out at the view? That's Rückenfigur, a German word derived from Rücken (back) and Figur (figure), which roughly translates to "figure seen from behind."

Rückenfigur is a technique in composition where a person is included in the scene facing out to the view rather than at the viewer. It's associated with German Romantic painting and the artist Caspar David Friedrich, who painted many paintings in this style.

I like Rückenfigur's ability to invite you to consider the person's perspective in the scene and what they're experiencing looking out. Especially as it's often used with grand scenes from Nature, I find Rückenfigur helps me appreciate the grandeur and wonder they may feel.

When I learned about the term, I realised that I use it all the time in photography. In photos, however, I think there are other good practical reasons to employ Rückenfigur, such as:

Focusing on the scene
Without showing a face, the viewer's attention is drawn to the landscape, not the individual.

Adding scale and context
A person in the frame provides a sense of size and invites contemplation from their perspective.

Privacy and shareability
Travel photos with friends or family members facing away are easier to share.

No face awkwardness
Like painting, photographing faces has a lot that can go wrong: people can have their eyes shut, be squinting, have an odd smile, no smile, bad hair...not having a visible person is more reliable.

When I see a beautiful scene such as this, somehow having a person there looking out helps put me in that person's shoes and experience that wonder again. And I think that's often what I'm trying to capture in a photo of Nature.

Or perhaps Friedrich started it because painting faces is hard?

The sketch is based on a photo I took in the breathtaking Jonkershoek Nature Reserve in South Africa in 2010.

Hitched to Everything Else in the Universe

Rucksack has a similar derivation translating to backpack.

Rückenfigur

Naismith's Rule provides a quick estimate for hiking time in the mountains, intended for "easy expeditions." It suggests:

+1 hour for every 2,000 ft (600m) of ascent

For example, suppose your hike covers 6 miles with 2,000 ft of ascent. In that case, Naismith's Rule suggests allowing 3 hours total—2 hours for distance and 1 hour for elevation.

(Here's a metric sketch of Naismith's Rule)

William Naismith was a Scottish Mountaineer born in 1856. He spent years trekking in the Highlands and was, to be fair, probably made of nails. In the Scottish Mountaineering Club Journal in 1893, he wrote:

"...a simple formula, that may be found useful in estimating what time men in fair condition should allow for easy expeditions, namely, an hour for every three miles on the map, with an additional hour for every 2,000 feet of ascent."

The Scottish Mountaineering Club Journal, Vol. II, September 1892, No.3, p.136 (pdf)

A figure I learned that's stuck with me is that a brisk walk is around 4 mph. But that's actually pretty fast and wouldn't apply on a mountain trail and certainly not hiking up a mountain. So I've run into the challenge myself when planning a trip in the mountains of how to guess how long a hike will likely take.

From a recent hike—where I made sure to run through the full kitchen table survival skills and 10 essentials before leaving—limited daylight was a safety consideration. So knowing how long the hike might take was really important. Incidentally, there's a rule of thumb, literally, for estimating remaining daylight.

Lots of people have put Naismith's Rule to the test, including me, and though it's a slightly optimistic metric, it's a starting point. On my recent hike, we were slightly over, but not by much.

To adjust for your circumstances, add time for:

Tricky or technical terrain and trail condition

Not being "in fair [physical] condition" in the view of a rugged mountaineer from Scotland in the 1890s

Photography, bird watching, animal spotting

The size of your group—I have heard the rule of thumb to add 15 mins for each person in your group

Presumably, if the hike was really long, you'd slow down

So, there are many reasons why Naismith's Rule may be on the light side. But it's a decent place to start from.

Killian Jornet Laughs in the Face of Naismith's Rule

Someone for whom Naismith's Rule definitely doesn't apply is the incredible Killian Jornet, whom I watched in the beautiful documentary Déjame Vivir on Netflix. Footage of him running along knife-edge ridges at the top of the Alps is breathtaking. In 2024, he hiked all 82 peaks above 4,000m in the Alps in 19 days without using motorized vehicles between them 🤯.

I was told about the term lock-miles, a kind of Naismith's Rule but for canal journeys rather than hikes. To estimate the journey time, you'd first calculate the lock-miles with the idea that it takes as long to travel through a lock as it does to travel a mile.

A journey of 10 miles with 5 locks would be 15 lock-miles. For experienced boaters, a typical speed might be 3 lock-miles an hour, so the journey of 15 lock-miles would take 5 hours.

Let me know if you give Naismith's Rule a try!

Prefer metric? So do I. Here's a metric Naismith's rule (with the approximate rounding)

Kaffikok — the time you can travel before needing another cup of coffee

I made some prints and products with and without the text in case, like me, you like a peaceful mountain ridge without any rules

Naismith's Rule for mountain hiking time

Kitchen table survival skills are survival skills you can put into practice from your kitchen table. I humbly submit my set of tried and tested (and at times learned from bitter experience) non-glamorous, but effective, kitchen table survival skills:

There's not always a choice, but having a good handle on the weather (know your clouds) can mean the difference between a nice day out and a disaster.

As Alistair Humphrey's writes in his book Local, "Unfolding a map is the ritual that launches all good journeys." There's art and science in route planning—considering the needs and abilities of your party, the terrain, the effect of the weather or altitude, availability of water, interest and views, access, timing, trail condition and more. So many varied aspects go into it. When planning a family hike now, we weigh up a very different set of factors than we did for two fit twenty-somethings happy to endure a little hardship.

If you're going to the wilderness, go with somebody if you can, and leave your intended plan with friends or family back home. If you're not back when expected, at least you'll have someone looking out for you, and a rescue party will know where to start looking.

OK, so it doesn't seem like a survival skill exactly, but going with a local guide will work wonders for your survival. You might not need one for a walk in the local woods, but if you fancy hiking on a glacier or venturing down a river, and it's not something you do too often, then hiring a guide will be the best survival decision you make.

Sure, you can head out and figure it out when you're out there, but mountains, and wilderness generally, are capricious places. There's so much a good hiking book, or a recent trip report can teach you before you set out. Is a river crossable? Is there still snow on a pass? Are the mosquitoes out in force? How long is it likely to take? How much up and down will there be? Where can you camp? And on and on.

Whenever I've been on semi-serious expeditions, I've been very impressed with the kit lists provided by our guides. Every item is carefully chosen—like, say, bringing the 10 essentials—and lists are refined and revisited after each trip. It's rarely exciting assembling your kit and running through lists, but if it means you remembered spare batteries, the water filter, mosquito repellent, or a fire lighter it may prove your saving grace in the wild.

More mundane perhaps, but still helpful, is packing your gear in the right places and order in which you'll use it. You're much more likely to stop and put on sun lotion or a warm hat if it isn't stuffed under your sleeping bag in the depths of your backpack.

When we're tired, it's easy to make poor decisions. The best defence I know for this is to plan trips within your limits so you aren't trying to find a camp spot in the dark, feeling too tired to filter the water, or too tired to keep track of where you're going. After a long day, it's easy to start skipping the things that keep us safe, like putting on an extra layer or stopping for water. A guide once told me, "don't be too lazy to be comfortable."

A small, but very useful practice, I've adopted is having a good awareness of time on your excursions. Plan in advance and estimate how long different sections may take. Making a mental note of when you set off from the trailhead or from a rest stop gives you a sense of your progress, lets you know what it might take to get back if you need to, and teaches you how far you might get ahead of you. If your pace is changing, you'll have a good idea of how strong everyone is still feeling. Knowing when the sun rises and sets and how much daylight you have left means you're less likely to find yourselves in the dark without a headlamp.

I'm sure you might have more to add to the list.

This set came from reflecting on our survival skills before a brilliant chat with Brendan Leonard of the excellent Semi-rad about all things Ultra on the Sketchplanations podcast (episode out in Autumn 2024). Growing up in the 80s, for me survival skills were things Crocodile Dundee had, or perhaps MacGyver. More recently, Bear Grylls would demonstrate making a shelter in the jungle, starting fires, or catching salmon to survive in the wild. However, I realised that my survival skills were much less glamorous, but still rather effective, and most of them are used before I head out on a trip. In other words, my survival skills are ones that mean (touch wood) I don't get into a scrape that need the traditional survival skills most of us think of.

As with so much in life, it's often the unglamorous stuff that makes the difference, like showing up every day, replicating before innovating, writing a rubbish first draft, or re-writing.

I hope this set may keep your expeditions Type I or Type II fun, rather than Type III.

Don't make important decisions on an empty stomach

Perhaps you were really expecting something about a kitchen table: how to set a table

Kitchen table survival skills

The Automation Paradox is that the better our machines get, the more we struggle when they fail.

When heading out for a hike in the woods, it's tempting to skip the map and compass and rely on our phones and apps for navigation. Yet when we encounter no signal or lose power, we can find ourselves in a sticky situation. Or perhaps, like me, you've come to rely on popping your destination into the satnav or Google Maps whenever you get in the car and have nearly forgotten the ability to navigate without it.

These situations illustrate the paradox of automation, where the more sophisticated and automated our machines and technologies become, the more bewildered we find ourselves when they inevitably fail. Or: the smarter the machines get, the dumber we might get.

In his book Messy, Tim Harford suggests three strands to the paradox as our machines get more sophisticated:

Automation covers up our mistakes, hiding our incompetence, meaning we may not learn to correct ourselves—consider autocorrect cleaning up our typos as we go.

When we rely on automation, we get less practice for our skills, so even highly skilled individuals may find their expertise diminishing—perhaps you've found yourself using your phone calculator for a trivial calculation.

When the easy scenarios are taken care of, failures may occur in complex or unpredictable ways that we may find especially difficult to recover from—like a subtle but persistent failure in the steering of a passenger plane, recovering from a skid on an icy road, or when you're deeply lost in the wilderness.

More sophisticated technology can even make it useless or more dangerous when it fails. Older cars used to be reparable forever. Now, if your vehicle fails, it's likely to need plugging in at the dealership to figure out what's up. How many electronic devices are thrown away because somewhere inside, some tiny loose connection or component makes the whole thing worthless? Were pilots and flight crews better prepared and able to improvise before the autopilot became ubiquitous?

I often wish our devices would fail more like an escalator or an electric toothbrush. If an escalator fails, you can still walk up it. If your electric toothbrush dies, you can still use it to brush your teeth. These could be called Technology-Enhanced Products, perhaps. But when most of our devices die, they're often rendered worthless.

Automation and sophisticated machines help me so much. I did use Grammarly to help check this post. I use Google Maps nearly every time I put in my destination to home, and I often use a calculator to check my maths. But I do pay attention to grammar corrections, bring a paper map when I can, and keep trying to do the maths in my head.

But as Tim Harford explains it, we still face "the paradox of automation: the better the machines get, the more bewildered we are when the machines fail."

The Dunning-Kruger effect (send me proof of purchase of Big Ideas Little Pictures, and I'll send the sketch to you)

Tolkein-style landscape inspired by the excellent Lord of Maps.

The Automation Paradox

Point Nemo is the furthest point in the ocean from any land.

Imagine falling overboard and needing to swim to the nearest shore; the longest possible swim would start at Point Nemo. This puzzle, known as the Longest Swim Problem, finds its solution far into the Pacific Ocean at Point Nemo.

The furthest point from land is a point with a maximum equal distance to three points of land. If you moved in any direction from there, you'd be closer to one of the points. The three nearest landmasses to Point Nemo, each about 2,688 km away, are:

Moto Nui, a small islet off the coast of the well-known Rapa Nui (Easter Island)

Maher Island, off the coast of Antarctica

If you’ve ever been somewhere with only the sea in all directions, imagine what it would feel like to begin a 2,688 km swim from there.

The antipode to Point Nemo, the point directly opposite it on Earth's surface, lies somewhere in Kazakhstan.

Croatian survey engineer Hrvoje Lukatela identified and named Point Nemo after Captain Nemo from Jules Verne's classic "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea." Lukatela faced challenges in determining its exact coordinates, such as choosing the edge of Ducie Atoll's tidal sandbar and Maher Island being beneath ice for most of the year.

Being so remote, space agencies use the area around Point Nemo as a spacecraft cemetery, sending old satellites and space debris to fall there. Likely, the closest people to Point Nemo are often those in the International Space Station passing overhead a mere 400km above.

Point Nemo is also known as the Oceanic Pole of Inaccessibility. In contrast, the continental point of inaccessibility—the point on land furthest from the ocean—is in northwestern China near Kazakhstan, a remarkable 2,645 km from the nearest shore.

Point Nemo has a lovely spread in Simon Kuestenmacher's book Marvellous Maps. Writing about Point Nemo makes me want to rewatch Life of Pi (and listen to the captivating music).

Point Nemo

Nearly every iceberg you see in a picture or diagram is probably floating the wrong way. This was what I learned (from Megan Thompson-Munson) after sketching Biz Stone's brilliant saying about the myth of overnight success.

With some approximation, the density of ice is around 900 kg/m3, and seawater is around 1,000 kg/m3. Therefore, the fraction of an iceberg that's submerged is around ~900/1000 or 0.9. So, about 90% of an iceberg is below the surface and 10% above, which is partly why they can be so dangerous. While most iceberg pictures get this part more or less correct, most of these icebergs will be floating vertically. In reality, a tall, thin iceberg will likely topple, so most icebergs end up floating on their side, not their tips, even though we rarely draw them this way.

I remember learning about a fascinating experiment with children of different ages estimating which glass holds more water: a tall, slender one filled high or a wider glass filled to a lower level. Younger children almost always chose the glass with the higher water level as the most water, even when it was significantly less than the shorter and wider glass. I wonder if it's part of why we draw icebergs vertically, at least when we're using them as a metaphor. It's easier to grasp quantities vertically, and we commonly underestimate volume spread over a wider area.

We may still want to draw our icebergs tall and deep to make our point, but now, at least, we can do so with the knowledge that they're not like the real ones.

If you want to see it yourself, Joshua Tauberer made a brilliant draw-an-iceberg-and-see-how-it-will-float game. I recommend you give it a go so it sinks in forever (sorry).

Know your poles: penguins or polar bears, frozen ice or land

Iceberg orientation

Point positive is a rafting term for agreeing in advance to point towards the safe way out of danger rather than towards the dangers themselves.

So, should a raft get stuck on a rock in a rapid, pointing positive would be pointing away from the obstacles to help a raft behind navigate through safely. Or should there be an unintentional swimmer, pointing positive is pointing towards the safest channel to steer towards.

Like "Don't fix the blame, fix the problem," point positive is a valuable metaphor and reminder that it's often less helpful to dwell on difficulties and problems than to direct others and our energies toward positive ways forward and solutions.

Also see: It's easier to give privacy than to find it

Point positive

Mangroves are many species of tree adapted to living in salty water along coastlines and tidal rivers not far from the equator. They are remarkable in many ways and confer a host of benefits to their habitats. Here are some significant ones.

Mangroves and mangrove habitats play a major role in protecting coastal settlements from storm surges and waves. Mangroves significantly reduce the energy of waves, lowering wave height inland, including from tsunamis, and reduce surges from tropical storms. We took a boat through the mangroves in Southern Vietnam once, and it was an eye-opening maze of channels and islands. I could see how they act like a natural breakwater.

Mangroves help stabilise land from erosion. This helps plants and fauna inland make their homes. Mangrove root systems also trap sediment brought downriver or from the sea, building their environment and creating peaty soil when they decay.

Their incredible prop root network creates a wonderful sheltered space for marine wildlife to grow and develop. The nooks and crannies help protect young from predators until they are older and can better fend for themselves. This protective environment increases populations and helps local fishers and communities. The calm and sheltered waters inside mangrove habitats also provide sanctuary for birds and a host of other non-marine wildlife.

Mangroves are an excellent carbon sink. They capture carbon as they grow, and the low-oxygen sediments deposited beneath them help lock carbon away.

I've contributed to plant trees through Eden Projects with a portion of any monthly or one-off support I receive. I wanted to explain Mangroves partly because, as of July 2023, together, we've passed 26,000 trees planted, most in mangrove restoration projects in Madagascar, and provided over 350 work days for locals.

"Madagascar is one of the world's top biodiversity conservation priorities because of its endemic species and severe habitat loss rates. Restoration in Madagascar is important because the destruction of the mangrove estuaries along the coastline has caused mudflats to wash into the ocean, destroying once-productive fisheries and increasing the vulnerability of coastal communities to hurricanes, tsunamis, and floods. In the dry deciduous forests, deforestation threatens one of the world's rarest and most diverse forest systems."

Mangroves make a real difference. To everyone who's helped make this happen, thank you!

Mangroves

It's hard to beat the feeling of the warmth of the winter sun on your face. There's a word for it too: apricity. Uplifting, hopeful, calming — even a few short moments to bask in an unexpected, weak but glorious gleam of winter sunlight is wonderful.

A brief burst of apricity warms the spirits and your skin. It reminds me of distant warm, long, summer days, and the promise of spring in a few months. If it has been bleak and cold, apricity is that much more welcome.

From the UK's position in the Northern hemisphere, with the sun low on the horizon, you can let the sun hit full in your face in the middle of the day without craning your neck or leaning back. It's never too hot to seek shade, and often just the right brightness that facing it dead on with your eyes closed is ideal. Together with the long shadows of winter, the effect can have you swept up with the rays, letting them soak into your skin and transporting you away from the cold under your feet.

From the latin aprico, 'to warm in the sun', and in turn aperio, 'lying open', it has been around since at least 1623. It feels to me like we'd benefit from its resurgence.

Apricity

I've always been fascinated by how a tiny spider can create a web spanning a gap where climbing and dragging a thread across the floor would be impossible, maybe between trees, from a building to a lamppost, or over a stream. How do they do that? Here's a common technique by many orb weaver spiders — known for building orb-shaped, or circular wheel-shaped webs — for bridging the gap and creating the web.

The spider stands on the edge and lets out a long thread. It waits for the breeze to blow the thread away from them. If the thread catches onto something it can form a bridge thread.

Once it catches, the spider may reinforce the thread and then put down other anchors. These then form the frame of the web into which it will add radial threads from the centre.

The spider may then put down an auxiliary thread that provides a non-sticky frame, together with the radial threads, for it to walk on while it lays down the final sticky capture spiral. It's then set to lie in wait.

Some spiders will eat their webs at the end of the night but leave a bridge thread in place — perhaps for you to walk into in the morning — ready to rebuild the next night.

There is a vast diversity of spiders and webs. This is a fairly common example, but even within orb spider webs, there are a ton of different strategies for capturing prey. But perhaps, the next time you spot a bridge thread spanning a seemingly impossible gap this will give you a thought as to how it might have been done.

Here's a common orb spider web as a static sketch

You can watch darwin's bark spider on the BBC creating a web spanning a remarkable 25 metres

A common orb spider web

Often, it's easier to give privacy than it is to find it. This is often true in the great outdoors. If you can't easily find privacy then it's good to have an attitude among your group to give privacy instead.

When stopping a raft for lunch at the side of a river there may be no cover at all. A handy phrase for how to give some privacy when you needed to go pee was 'skirts up, pants down' — girls go upstream, boys go downstream. Or try finding some privacy when you're roped in a group of six walking up a glacier all day where you can't unrope — in that case, it's boys to one side of the rope, girls to the other.

You can give privacy almost anywhere even when it's near impossible to find it.

I was taught this by the excellent river guides at ROW.

It's easier to give privacy than to find it

Many trees and forests were built to live with fire and in many cases, fire is essential for a healthy ecosystem. Giant sequoias, for example, have cones that dry out during surface fires releasing their seeds so they can germinate at the ideal time to grow with less competition.

Ponderosa pines have a number of ways they have evolved to live with fire.

They have bark that when heated can split off from the tree protecting the trunk and reducing the spread of fire. 

They often lose lower branches, sometimes from smaller fires, reducing the likelihood of ladder fires that climb towards the crown.

The shade they cast and the acidic soil they favour helps reduce understory plants that could catch fire beneath the tree and help a fire to latch onto the main trunk.

They have deep roots that can remain intact after a fire allowing the tree to still gather water and nutrients even when surface roots are damaged.

Some policies of suppressing natural fires have changed the balance of many forest systems and helped promote some of the recent mega-fires.

More about the Fire ecology of ponderosa pines (pdf).

Also see: identify a douglas fir, time hierarchy

Ponderosa pine fire protections

Heat islands are urban areas that can have higher temperatures than surrounding rural areas with more greenery.

Heat islands are caused by several factors, including:

the types of materials we use in cities for buildings, pavement, and roads that can absorb more heat than natural surfaces such as leaves or grass

human additions to the sun's heat, such as air conditioning, vehicles, cooking, or machinery

the shapes of our cities that may restrict airflow to carry heat away

the mass of our buildings that can absorb heat and release it gradually, even through the night

More natural, often rural areas with greenery may reflect more light, release moisture and provide shade.

There are ways to help reduce the effect of heat islands, such as planting more urban trees or using green roofs.

Deciduous trees have the handy feature of providing shade for a house in the summer while letting light through in the winter when the leaves fall.

A study using 2015 data found that "doubling tree cover in European cities could cut the number of heat-related deaths during summer months by nearly 40 per cent." In Columbia's Medellín, creating 30 Green Corridors helped to reduce temperatures by 2°C in the first three years of the program.

Learn more about the heat island effect on the EPA site.

Heat islands

Only dead fish go with the flow. To me, this is a nice reminder to swim your path in life and be true to yourself.

I heard about this from Patricia Ryan Madson in her book Improv Wisdom, and she, in turn, saw it in a Welsh pub.

"To reach a port we must sail. Sail, not tie at anchor. Sail, not drift."

Only dead fish go with the flow

A time hierarchy example is how durable dynamic systems have elements, or layers, that change at different rates.

Just like for pace layers, the fast layers that change quickly provide innovation, while the slower layers stabilise and remember.

In his short article Pace Layering: How Complex Systems Learn and Keep Learning, Stewart Brand gives this evocative example of the time hierarchy of a coniferous forest:

"Take a coniferous forest.  The hierarchy in scale of pine needle, tree crown, patch, stand, whole forest, and biome is also a time hierarchy.  The needle changes within a year, the crown over several years, the patch over many decades, the stand over a couple of centuries, the forest over a thousand years, and the biome over ten thousand years.  The range of what the needle may do is constrained by the crown, which is constrained by the patch and stand, which are controlled by the forest, which is controlled by the biome.  Nevertheless, innovation percolates throughout the system via evolutionary competition among lineages of individual trees dealing with the stresses of crowding, parasites, predation, and weather.  Occasionally, large shocks such as fire or disease or human predation can suddenly upset the whole system, sometimes all the way down to the biome level."

It's an example of his wonderful framework of pace layers, which he applies to the working structure of a robust and adaptable civilisation.

Time hierarchy

"This negative is the score. The print is the performance."

This memorable analogy is from Ansel Adams, one of the foremost American photographers.

From the negative captured by the camera, Ansel would experiment with cropping, dodging and burning (lightening and darkening) to create the final print.

We have a large print of moon and half dome in our hallway. It reminds me that what the camera captured directly isn't the final piece. You still have the performance to perform.

The analogy works beyond photographs. A recipe, a script, a joke, or a business idea all still need the right performance.

Prints and performances

Not all of us can ditch jobs, families and responsibilities and choose to spend the next few months trekking across some tundra or cycling to China. Those are adventures sure, but, argues Alastair Humphreys, we don't need something of that scale to get a perspective-shifting snap out of the daily grind and connection with nature — we can try a microadventure instead.

A microadventure might be as simple as camping in the garden with your family, paddling down a local river and camping on the bank, or staying the night on a nearby hilltop under the stars, catching the sunrise with a wild swim to wake up and being back in time for breakfast.

The essence is that they are short, simple, local, and cheap. No fancy gear, complex planning, big budgets or long travel. An achievable adventure for normal people without giving up the rest of our lives to do it.

In this time when bigger trips are difficult it seems that people have been spending more time exploring locally and finding out the richness of the natural spots that are nearby. We could all use a microadventure from time-to-time. 

Microadventure

Ever since I came across Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi's concept of Flow it has stayed with me as a simple framework and beacon for finding joy, creativity, and total involvement with life.  

"What I 'discovered' was that happiness is not something that happens. It is not the result of good fortune or random chance. It is not something that money can buy or power command. It does not depend on outside events, but, rather, on how we interpret them. Happiness, in fact, is a condition that must be prepared for, cultivated, and defended privately by each person. People who learn to control inner experience will be able to determine the quality of their lives, which is as close as any of us come to being happy."

When researching happiness Csikszentmihalyi found that be they climbers, ballet dancers, chess players, or gardeners, people gave surprisingly similar descriptions to how they felt at their peak experience while performing an activity.

When in flow people are wholly focused on the present moment, they experience a strong sense of control, they lose their self-consciousness and their ego, their experience of time changes so that time can fly by or a moment can seem to slow down, and the joy of performing the activity becomes an end in itself.

Flow has a fairly simple set of conditions which I find myself using as a little mental checklist:

When climbing, a prototypical flow activity, it's clear that you are trying to get to the top, you can immediately see if you are making progress and whether an action progressed you or not, and it's wise to pick a wall that is difficult but not impossible, for you to enjoy it. No wonder climbing can be so addictive.

By contrast, it was evident to me that none of these were present when studying for my PhD.

I also like flow because it reminds me that peak happiness is unlikely to be experienced by sitting around watching the TV.

The quote is from, Flow, the psychology of happiness, by Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, who also taught me that any name can work to do great work.

Flow

It all matters. Be it one person, one bird, or one tree. We are all connected. As John Muir wrote in My First Summer in the Sierra:

"As soon as we take one thing by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe."

The sketch is Heart Lake in his beloved Sierra Nevada.

Hitched to everything else in the universe

Some simple wisdom from Kurt Vonnegut: notice when you’re happy.

“My uncle Alex Vonnegut, a Harvard-educated life insurance salesman who lived at 5033 North Pennsylvania Street, taught me something very important.

He said that when things were really going well, we should be sure to NOTICE it. He was talking about simple occasions, not great victories: maybe drinking lemonade on a hot afternoon in the shade, or smelling the aroma of a nearby bakery; or fishing, and not caring if we catch anything or not, or hearing somebody all alone playing a piano really well in the house next door.

Uncle Alex urged me to say this out loud during such epiphanies: “If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is”

"So I do the same now, and so do my kids and grandkids. And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ‘If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.”

Notice when you're happy: If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is

In some forests where the trees grow tall and straight, like those in the US Pacific Northwest, when a giant tree falls, it creates an opening in the forest canopy that lets in light for new growth to take foot. The mighty fallen tree trunks themselves provide a new surface for seedlings to take root, away from the competition of the forest floor. When this happens, the fallen tree becomes an integral part of a new ecosystem.

Such fallen trees are known as nurse logs. Sometimes, a nurse log is so successful as a nursery for the young trees that they will grow along the full length of the fallen trunk. When the original trunk finally decays, it leaves behind it a remarkable, straight line of trees.

Nurse log

People are complicated. Life is complicated. Ecosystems are complicated. And despite our best efforts or intentions, we have a remarkable history of messing things up in unexpected ways.

One simple theory for why this may be is that unintended consequences are likely to happen whenever we try to regulate a complex system by using a simple system. This so often happens in any kind of large-scale or government attempt to control something within a complex system using relatively simple programs, regulations, laws, policies or other actions. Things will happen that we didn’t anticipate.

Examples of the Law of Unintended Consequences

A policy of suppressing forest fires that goes on to cause even greater fires.

An attempt to reduce traffic in Bogotá by restricting who could drive each day based on licence plates that led people to simply buy more cars.

More open workplaces that cause people to behave more privately: the transparency paradox.

Elimination of predators that leads to the proliferation of grazing animals and a reduction in diversity.

The effects of literally any dam built anywhere.

Or social distancing policies that results in outdoor natural spaces being crammed with people at weekends.

The traffic example in Bogotá is from the Freakonomics podcast episode on the cobra effect. The workplace privacy example is known as the transparency paradox.

Related Ideas to the Law of Unintended Consequences

Often, as with some of these, the outcome can be the opposite of what you intended, known as the cobra effect. Controlling complex systems is difficult.

Nature sketches