“Basically, I had stopped seeing problems—even dangerous ones—as disasters and started seeing them as a normal part of travel in deep wilderness. If you spend enough time outdoors, no matter how well you prepare, you’re going to encounter a crisis sooner or later. Trust your future self to handle what comes.”

“The problem — the primary human problem — is that people are susceptible, prideful, bullheaded, egotistic, dumbstruck and lazy. Add to this doomed slurry a little avalanche training (or what used to qualify as avalanche training, and its focus on analyzing snowpack), and people make terrible decisions with greater frequency and confidence.”

““What people refer to as intuition: We use it every day to describe a certain feeling, but we didn’t know for sure it existed,” Dr. Pearson said. “With our work, we have shown strong evidence that unconscious feelings and emotions can combine with conscious feelings, and we can use it to make better decisions.””

“Kindness can and should be taught. Niceness, however, springs from a desire to please others, even if it’s at our own expense.”