A quick note on positioning

And scientists and snow leopards and failure and prosociality

I’ve heard that being a wildlife photographer can be fantastically boring. I met a nature photographer on an airplane once, and he described spending hours/days/weeks/months making his way to, and staying in, the same place over and over again, hoping to see something exciting—and hoping to be in the right position with the right equipment and good lighting to get the shot when he finally did.

Scientists face a similar kind of monotony.

In one of my first real gigs as a professional writer, I was tasked with finding 50 STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) professionals with cool jobs, interviewing them, and writing up their stories to inspire kids toward STEM professions¹. I talked to a NASA engineer on the Mars rover mission, the paleontologist who discovered dreadnoughtus, a marine biologist studying the ocean floor, and many other scientists doing just the sexiest things.

And while the results of their work were often electrifying to learn and write about, their days were full of tedium. The tougher the questions they asked, or the rarer the thing they pursued, the more arduous and trying the task.

And, the lower their chances of success.

There’s an entire book, Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard, dedicated to this kind of pursuit. Spoiler alert: In a book about a months-long journey through 1970s Himalayan territory… a book whose title is The. Snow. Leopard… neither Matthiessen nor his applied biologist trekmate ever saw a snow leopard². As the 1978 book noted, in 1973, there had only been two sightings of a snow leopard in the area in the past three decades. And not by them, turns out.

Photo by Saravanan Rajaraman on Unsplash

Unlike a photo of rare wildlife, or the discovery of dreadnoughtus, or the Mars rover landing, stories of ‘almost’ and ‘not quite’ don’t often make it to press.

But. They. Are. Everywhere.

18th-century astronomer Guillaume Le Gentil, for example, signed up to travel to the ends of the Earth as one of a collective of scientists to observe and measure both the 1761 and 1769 transits of Venus. At the time, these observations were necessary for humanity to be able to calculate the Earth’s distance from the Sun, a calculation that was itself necessary to map our solar system. And since transits of Venus came about in pairs, eight years apart, once every 121ish years (it’s complicated), these two treks would be humanity’s only shots in a generation.

Know what happened?

In 1761, Le Gentil’s ship from Paris to Pondicherry (a then French colony in India) was blown off course, and he found himself at sea and unable to make the first observation. Then in 1769, he decided to try his luck in Manila, but when the Spanish authorities there gave him grief, he headed back to Pondicherry to try to observe Venus there. But, on the day of the transit, the Pondicherry sky was plagued by cloud cover, and he saw nothing. Then it was over.

“For the past nine years, he had travelled tens of thousands of miles, crossed the oceans and risked his life several times — ‘only to be the spectator of a fatal cloud.’”³

Photo by Andrea Proietti on Unsplash

Usually, when stories like this surface in posts like this, the takeaway turns failure into a victory with some kind of story of personal resilience. But that’s not exactly where I’m going with this one.

In The Art of Mountain Biking, we talked about positioning a lot—often as one of the most important things we can focus on. Positioning oneself properly on the bike, we said, allows us to free up all kinds of movement and expression and experiences. Our positioning is something we can greatly influence when presented with the many things we can’t. It gives us something productive to do.

But what about those times when positioning isn’t enough? What about when we don’t get the shot or don’t see the snow leopard or fall victim to storms and cloud cover?

I know this seems like a very lengthy way of stating the obvious: Sometimes, we do everything we can to get it right, and things still don’t go our way. I have felt this experience keenly over the past several years—I feel it keenly right now. And on an individual level, it’s one of the most difficult realities to bear and make sense of—when luck (or as some might say, providence) doesn’t go our way.

But on a collective level, it seems to make a bit more sense.

Le Gentil failed to observe the transits of Venus. But you know who didn’t? “Some 250 observers at 130 locations [who] had aimed their telescopes at the sky.”⁴ That brief opportunity that lasted mere hours before disappearing again for over a century presented itself to a collective, and several took their shot at answering it. And ultimately, humanity got what it needed, even if Le Gentil didn’t.

I realize this might not be as comforting as we’d like—hell, I’m not soaring from this takeaway either. But I do find some relief in the idea that my life, and my individual contributions to the world, emerge as a part of a larger and longer whole. It helps me to feel less alone and softens the blows of bad luck and bad timing and missed connections and almosts and not-quites. And in a society that values individual success and promulgates self focus over our responsibilities to and for one another, I like to imagine that if my shot doesn’t come, someone else’s might.

And on that day, I sure hope they make it. For all of us.

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Have a great weekend, folks. Take care of each other.

Love,

Danielle

1. To this day, it was by far the funnest job I’ve ever had.

2. Before those of you who have read it yell at me, I know the actual focus of the book wasn’t to actually see a snow leopard, but rather the leopard was a sort of specter haunting the trip.

3. From Andrea Wulf’s Chasing Venus, p 185

4. Also from Chasing Venus, p 185