For what it’s worth, it probably began in my university days when studying Computer Science, almost twenty years ago now, when I found myself particularly drawn to the modules of visual modeling in the design of business information systems; with particular emphasis on software design. Indeed it feels like a rather grandiose title to proclaim scientist, I was more a lover of analyzing and designing ways to think about information. To store it, make sense of it and then do something useful. 2 + 2 in an intelligent system should lead to 8, 10, or 12, depending on what we want of its sum. Sometimes my own, inspired by others when so; diagrammatic schemes always the way forward.

Another milestone came a couple of years later when stumbling upon beautiful Mindmaps by Tony Buzan. They clearly made quite an impression, I bought the book and began playing with them whenever, which was and is quite often, I found the mind to understand something new. So convinced was I (within a newfound love of the cultural value of education) that I must share such methodic wisdom with high-school students, but I usually think of Diagram Of Lifes’ inception on a bright summer afternoon when I found myself sitting with the usual blank sheet of paper, pencil in hand, with an intention to represent the rather pleasing concept of life’s relativity (which is at least more pleasing and is certainly more interesting and enjoyable than nothingness), to see an image jumping to the sheet. Call it a hunch, I presume, but I knew right there that it would become the core of a special design. Two years later I decided to devote a reasonable portion of my life to this; sixteen years, as it’s turned out (at the time of writing). 

There were many worried, startled looks, which was understandable, it was to bring an end to yet another career adventure, just after completing post-graduate teacher training on this occasion, but I set out with excitement: I would make it my utmost endeavor to connect the dots into as simple an answer as I could manage. So I was pleased, to put it mildly, to meet many others loving my design when I used it to fill my small rented shop-come-exhibition in the heart of Old Town Edinburgh as a registered part of its Arts Festival. And decided that I knew I must create this book. 

In two words, diagrams are superbly brilliant. Were we to travel back through time and visit the creative spaces of many if not all our great geniuses – certainly those of Galileo, Leonardo De Vinci, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, Michelangelo, Marie Curie, to name but a few – then we would find this really quite remarkable intelligence. Along with dizzying heights of obsession until that unforgettable ah-ha breakthrough, in at least the case of these leading thinkers and a great many more besides (most of whom I’m probably not aware of), we would find there a diagram.

They really are marvelous things. When it comes to creating, recording and communicating ideas, nothing quite competes. Strings of words are a wonderful tool. I have, after all, taken quite some time to write this book. Writing this has had me peer really deeply into some of its finer aspects but a map of visual forms brings a strength of its own: an obligation to force relationships, connections between things. They bring things together in concert into coherence. They strip the stray words, the repetition; out with the unnecessary. An aid of focus, like a guiding lens to the essentials, the foundations — the most abstract when done well, and so they can bring also an incredible simplicity to a subject. 

Or to put to answer the question another way: I love them because I deeply adore trying to understand how things work, or at least how things could. I love a good ponder. So how could I not attempt such a job for the biggest most cherished ideas of life?

They say it is an endurance to perform at the Edinburgh Festival. It is. And I didn’t quite have the pressure of expectant faces, paying, if only with the preciousness of their time, to be continuously entertained for a full-on hour no matter my mood or energy felt, but I certainly put in the time. Doors opened at 10 am and remained so until 8 that evening, affording me a little nature time (usually up on Arthur’s Seat), shopping, and perhaps a show before sleep and meal preparations the following morning; one of which was usually eaten ‘out’ on my much cherished half-hour dinner break at four-thirty. 

As you entered Cowgate Gallery (which, to possibly save you the trouble, is not now a gallery, had never been before and I rather suspect never will again; it’s now a nail bar) you’d meet the core of the diagram (the core of life, I would humbly add) immediately to the left. It was the first part of the wall you’d confront and it seemed appropriate as a greeting for punters and it afforded slightly more space than its adjacent offering, which was connected by a slither of a mesh-like pattern (to offer symbolical consistency to the philosophical idea that everything’s connected) to the more psychological side of evolution, once it is able and willing to think about things, as it clearly sometimes can. 

Naturally, I met a few pessimistic giggles but mostly I found intrigue. That I came across with such confidence in at least trying to answer the many questions, seems a little ironic today. I knew much less back then (including humility, I could almost say with regret), yet it’s also true that the diagram — which is really to say the ideas and how they fit together — hasn’t really changed too much. Many insights have come since but they’re more of a periphery, its essential core lays unshaken. 

This may be my greatest confidence: that it remains a beautiful vision and an intelligent one after all the reading, thinking, and meditating. These few straightforward ideas make a lot of sense. And not just intuitively but logically, into wonderous philosophical consistency. Now I’m not saying they are ‘true’, it’s important to note for many reasons, but I’m comfortable to say that they solve some of the biggest ideas — problems, they’ve often been called — of the most profound ideas about life. 

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Yet there was a question that I had absolutely no response for what exactly I was going to do next? What should I do with this thing? What can I? I had no business plan, nothing to sell (partly because I wanted to give it away), I had a website with simple explanatory descriptions (that were mirrored on a tiny wall next to my chair space and living shelf, I used to call it), a PayPal donation link, and nothing more than there a written promise that I indeed intended the exhibition to not be the end of my Diagram Of Life, and left it at that. So it came with quite a renewed sense of purpose, quite late on in the event as it happened, when a visitor suggested I should write it. (Her academically informed suggestion that I ought to consider its content for a doctorate in philosophy is one I’m glad I didn’t take; not to at all discredit the discipline. We’ve been good friends ever since). 

And so it is that after I don’t know how many revisions, re-edits, and one publication (if only on Amazon with no promotion but it did have an ISBN) — fifteen years later it manages to find its way into your conscious awareness. /

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/ But why create an interconnected diagram of life in the first place? you may well wonder.