“Eureka.” This is a word that many say has changed history. Its utterance conveys a sort of revelation, a single moment where a problem and its solution become, all at once, perfectly clear, where nothing stands between person and perception. The experience this word represents is proclaimed by many to be the driving force behind great minds and great ideas. However, I can’t say that I’ve ever known such an experience. There has never been a single moment in which a complete idea, problem, or solution has suddenly been revealed to me in an instant of understanding, never a moment worthy of shouting “eureka.” But I do know of something better, something more lasting and more impactful. “Confluence,” I call it, “the place where two streams flow together,” where the details and the big picture meet to form one seamless, perfect image, even more so than could be possible through a sudden epiphany. This experience, my own eureka, happens not because a single concept or idea instantly makes sense in my head, but because many ideas coalesce over time to allow me to gain a deeper understanding of their place in the world. It works slowly, but at times I find that it is the force behind all understanding, the reason progression is possible not only for me, but perhaps for the world as a whole. Progress, after all, is rooted in understanding; achieving it often means solving key questions about the world. The important ones, the ones about how to exist on a planet of seven billion people and still live peacefully with our surroundings, are elusive, complex, and ever-changing, but they are not out of reach.

Along the coasts of Mexico, many people still eat the eggs of endangered sea turtles. They do so not because they are all bad people, but because they often believe they need to in order to survive. So the tough question one must ask is how to protect important species without destroying these people’s livelihoods. However, biologists in Mexico know all too well that while some poachers steal eggs to survive, others do so out of greed or out of disregard for turtle species that are beneficial to both Mexico’s and the entire world’s health and biodiversity. The biologists’ job, then, is not only to study, protect, and preserve the turtles themselves, but also to address a culture of indifference toward conservation.

Traveling to Mexico and seeing the issues first-hand had a huge impact on my ability to interpret and address these problems; just the one week I spent there was enough to begin piecing together the million ideas in my head. Living the biologists’ reality for this time, working 3 a.m. shifts aiding newly hatched turtles, walking the beach and seeing mother turtles in the flesh, doing the work the biologists do and speaking to the people they speak to… all this helped me realize the implications of a project that affects, on La Gloria beach in Jalisco, Mexico, just a few hundred nesting turtles per year, but that in the grand scheme of things impacts a globally important resource. This project was the ultimate example of the complexity of it all: saving just one species on one beach is a huge endeavor, so how do we save all the species on all the beaches, let alone manage all the resources on the entire planet?

Slowly, these insights have been settling in my mind. The world’s most important questions are too often the hardest to understand, but conquering them is not impossible. Combining the large and the small, the clear and the abstruse, can happen, but only through time, and through something more than a single moment. My experiences have shaped my understanding of the world, thanks not to eureka, but to something more complex, and more shaping: the place where two streams flow together, and ideas converge.