The Explorer’s Wheel introduces you to a new way of thinking about the world and creative problem solving, which I call “intertidal thinking.”
Please enjoy linked audio by Julian Gresser on “Intertidal Thinking.”
Mark Twain on the Joy of Discovery.
What is it that confers the noblest delight? What is that which swells a man’s breast with pride above that which any other experience can bring to him? Discovery! To know that you are walking where none others have walked; that you are beholding what human eye has not seen before; that you are breathing a virgin atmosphere. To give birth to an idea—to discover a great thought—an intellectual nugget, right under the dust of a field that many a brain-plow had gone over before. To find a new planet, to invent a new hinge, to find a way to make the lightnings carry your messages. To be the first—that is the idea. To do something, say something, see something, before anybody else—these are the things that confer a pleasure compared with which other pleasures are tame and commonplace, other ecstasies cheap and trivial. Morse, with his first message, brought by his servant, the lightning; Fulton in that long-drawn century of suspense, when he placed his hand upon the throttle-valve, and low, the steamboat moved; Jenner, when his patient with a cow’s virus in his blood, walked through the small pox hospitals unscathed; Howe, when the idea shot through his brain that for a hundred and twenty generations the eye had been bored through the wrong end of the needle; the nameless lord of art who laid down his chisel in some old age that is forgotten now, and gloated upon the finished Loacoön; Daguerre, when he commanded the sun, riding in the zenith, to print the landscape upon his insignificant silvered plate, and he obeyed; Columbus in the Pinta’s shrouds when he swung his hat above a fabled sea and gazed abroad upon an unknown world! These are the men who have really lived—who have actually comprehended what pleasure is—who have crowded long lifetimes of ecstasy into a single moment.”
