Tag: explorers

What Every Kid Should Be Able to Do by Age Sixteen, by Audrey Sutherland’s

June 3rd, 2024
- Swim 400 yards easily
- Do dishes in a strange house, and your own
- Cook a simple meal
- See work to be done and do it
- Care for tools and always put them away after use
- Splice or put a fixture on an electric cord
- Know basic information about five careers that suit you
- Volunteer to work for a month in each of those fields
- Clean a paintbrush after use
- Change a diaper, and a tire
- Listen to an adult talk with interest and empathy
- Take initiative and responsibility for school work and home chores
- Dance with any age
- Clean a fish and dress a chicken
- Drive a car with skill and sanity
- Know and take responsibility for sexual conception and protection when needed
- Know the basic five of first aid: restore breathing and heartbeat, control bleeding, dilute poisons, immobilize fractures, treat for shock
- Write a business letter
- Spend the family income for all bills and necessities for two months
- Know basic auto mechanics and simple repair
- Find your way across a strange city using public transportation
- Be happy and comfortable alone for ten days, ten miles from the nearest other person
- Save someone drowning using available equipment
- Find a paying job and hold it for a month
- Read at a tenth grade level
- Read a topographic map and a chart
- Know the local drug scene for yourself
- Handle a boat safely and competently (canoe, kayak, skiff, sailboat)
- Operate a sewing machine and mend your own clothes
- Operate a computer as needed
- Do your own laundry
What would you add to this list? What would you strike out?

Any here you feel are un-reasonable?

Patagonia. “Go Simple, Go Solo, Go Now: The Life of Audrey Sutherland.” Patagonia. Accessed June 2, 2024. https://www.patagonia.com/stories/go-simple-go-solo-go-now-the-life-of-audrey-sutherland/story-17793.html.
Audrey Sutherland’s helpful visualization exercise.

June 2nd, 2024

‘Close your eyes. Sit very quietly for a minute. Imagine that you were just given five million dollars. Now think what you would do if you had that five million dollars.’ After a pause, she would say, ‘I want you to open your eyes and think what is stopping you from doing those same things without the five million.’

– Audrey Sutherland

Go ahead. Close your eyes.

What would you do? What fear is holding you back?

The Audrey Sutherland: live immediately chapter inspires.

Oliver, Henry. Second Act: What Late Bloomers Can Tell You About Success and Reinventing Your Life. United Kingdom, John Murray Press, 2024. pg 223 of the Kindle Edition
Self-cultivation with explorer Audrey Sutherland

May 26th, 2024

She wasn’t what Callard calls aspirational – she never set out to become this sort of explorer. Instead, she constantly self-cultivated, expanding her interests to a point where they had become something new and extraordinary. As her consciousness expanded, journey by journey, accident by accident, and her instincts were honed, she came to see the world in new way

– Henry Oliver

If you’re not sure what your goal is, or what your next project should be, pursuing a life of self-cultivation can help reveal what’s next.

As Henry explains:

By cultivating your existing interests, you can gradually develop yourself into something new.

Oliver, Henry. Second Act: What Late Bloomers Can Tell You About Success and Reinventing Your Life. United Kingdom, John Murray Press, 2024.
Ecologist David Ainley’s Indispensable Friends

February 23rd, 2022

Can’t leave them behind

after spending more than 35 seasons in the Antarctic, my shelves are now crammed with field books. Many of the entries have since been logged into endless computer spreadsheets and exist in digital pixels to be shared with colleagues instantly around the world. Nevertheless, the daily context in which the data really lived is only revealed by going back and slowly thumbing my way through the books, page after page. It’s an enjoyable process returning to what have become, essentially, my indispensable ‘friends’.
David Ainley, Explorers’ Sketchbooks, pg 244

Lydia Davis returns to a sentence to better understand its meaning. Ecologist David Ainley returns to his journals, his indispensable ‘friends’, for enjoyment.

Repetition has multiple rewards.
Ecologist David Ainley’s makes his field books ‘unlosable’. Also, notes on frozen penguin guano

February 13th, 2022

Quickly I had learned that in the high Antarctic where I worked, besides the books, a knife to sharpen my pencil was indispensable, any ink in a pen usually freezing. And any sort of electronic device just would not work, and would be unreliable. I also learned, from some anxious experiences, that a field book had to become ‘un-losable’. Starting out, I once mislaid a book when trying to capture a skua with a net; it was often an athletic endeavor, with a bird diving one way, and my book flying out of my parka pocket in the other. Only after painstakingly retracing my steps was I able to recover it, its brown cover camouflaged among the endless boulders and frozen guano of the penguin colony. It was a huge relief – you can’t imagine how happy I was. Thereafter I would plaster the journals with bright yellow tape in fat stripes. Eventually I found field books bound in vivid orange covers. In the polar snows, these were just perfect.
David Ainley, Explorers’ Sketchbooks: The Art of Discovery & Adventure, pg 243

Even in this digital age, a pencil, a knife, and a field book plastered in fat striped, bright yellow tape are exploring essentials.

Tag: explorers

What Every Kid Should Be Able to Do by Age Sixteen, by Audrey Sutherland’s

Audrey Sutherland’s helpful visualization exercise.

Self-cultivation with explorer Audrey Sutherland

Ecologist David Ainley’s Indispensable Friends

Ecologist David Ainley’s makes his field books ‘unlosable’. Also, notes on frozen penguin guano