Inverting Clarke's Third Law

Arthur C. Clarke's Third Law states:

I enjoy inverting the trope:

What I mean by that is that "Nothing isn't trivial". Things which feel "magical", like Wi-Fi, are based upon fundamental principles which are quite straightforward. For instance, Wi-Fi is transferring information via frequency signalling. You can draw a diagram to show how you transfer bits using such a medium. That is a fundamental concept which, once you "get it", becomes very trivial.

The sensation I have in my bones, is that the entire world works in this way. It is possible to understand how a computer works: the fundamental principles are all trivial. There's a lot of them and they compose in difficult ways, but every step of the way someone had to combine ideas from before, and make sure those ideas got into manufacturing, etc. That means that for every idea driving how computers work today, multiple people had to understand it. And that means it is very likely that you can understand that idea, too.

It's not just about computing, I also feel this way about handstands. For a handstand I need only three things: sufficiently warmed up hands, push from the shoulders, and a tiny bit of body tension. Putting those together is, for me, the essence of a handstand. Quite simple.

That does not mean that acquiring those concepts and mastering them is easy. It's not. Learning a handstand requires a lot of time spent grinding. There's a large number of things you work on as you refine your understanding, like how wide to put your hands, how to push from the traps rather than the chest, how to correct from falling towards your stomach, etc. But in the end that all falls away. You balance at a variety of hand placements, you can choose to push from chest rather than traps, and your corrections are automatic.

It feels rather Zen-like. Once you understand things, they become perfectly simple. And perfectly simple is what they are. You can see this for yourself! It just might take some work to get there.