I do not think my experience is unique. Many scientists, no less than poets or artists, have a living relation to the past, not just an abstract sense of history and tradition but a feeling of companions and predecessors, ancestors with whom they enjoy a sort of implicit dialogue. Science sometimes sees itself as impersonal, as “pure thought,” independent of its historical and human origins. It is often taught as if this were the case. But science is a human enterprise through and through, an organic, evolving, human growth, with sudden spurts and arrests, and strange deviations, too. It grows out of its past but never outgrows it, any more than we outgrow our childhoods.

Nature vs. nurture is part of this—and then there is what I think of as anti-nurturing—the ways we in a western/US context are socialized to work against respecting the emergent

processes of the world and each other:

• We learn to disrespect Indigenous and direct ties to land.

• We learn to be quiet, polite, indirect, and submissive, not to disturb the status quo.

• We learn facts out of context of application in school. How will this history, science, math show up in our lives, in the work of growing community and home?

• We learn that tests and deadlines are the reasons to take action. This puts those with good short-term memories and a positive response to pressure in leadership positions, leading to urgency-based thinking, regardless of the circumstance.

• We learn to compete with each other in a scarcitybased economy that denies and destroys the abundant world we actually live in.

• We learn to deny our longings and our skills, and to do work that occupies our hours without inspiring our greatness.

• We learn to manipulate each other and sell things to each other, rather than learning to collaborate and evolve together.

• We learn that the natural world is to be manicured, controlled, or pillaged to support our consumerist lives. Even the natural lives of our bodies get medicated, pathologized, shaved or improved upon with cosmetic adjustments.

• We learn that factors beyond our control determine the quality of our lives—something as random as which skin, gender, sexuality, ability, nation, or belief system we are born into sets a path for survival and quality of life.

• In the United States specifically, though I see this most places I travel, we learn that we only have value if we can produce—only then do we earn food, home, health care, education.

• Similarly, we learn our organizations are only as successful as our fundraising results, whether the community impact is powerful or not.

• We learn as children to swallow our tears and any other inconvenient emotions, and as adults that translates into working through red flags, value differences, pain, and exhaustion.

• We learn to bond through gossip, venting, and destroying, rather than cultivating solutions together.

• Perhaps the most egregious thing we are taught is that we should just be really good at what’s already possible, to leave the impossible alone.

Exploration is about formulating hypotheses or best guesses; confirmation is about rigorously testing preliminary conclusions. Confirmation turns best guesses into sure bets. As in scientific discovery, the less we know about a phenomenon, the more open-ended our questions. As relevant knowledge builds up, we become more precise about what we seek to learn, and we start to anticipate (more and more accurately) what we will find.

As Jim’s experience illustrates, the experimental method does not necessarily entail an orderly sequence of steps in which one side project leads logically to a next. Instead, small probes are often fragmentary and spontaneous, driven by unexpected opportunities and dynamic situations. Jim’s wife got pregnant and Alaska was out. What next? A different kind of experiment. Like Ben and Carol, Jim went for variety in designing his experiments. But the trend is clear: Small wins may be scattered, but what counts is that together they amount to a sense of progress—away from the stifling situation we are trying to escape.

These impressions point to areas of our lives that are important to us, and they can be turned into something helpful using a simple but powerful exercise we developed for our Lifespan Research Foundation (www.lifespanresearch.org). This involves a bit of personal research, but if you’re game, come play along.