Category Archives: Life

Leadership, Life

Think Ten: Entering the World of NCAA Rifle

I’ve seen countless, wonderful posts about baseball, softball, basketball, wrestling, hockey, football, gymnastics, swimming, band, track, volleyball, robotics, cheer, lacrosse, dance, ski team, drama, karate, and soccer. Now that the season is done, and my boy is a man, I’d like to share a largely unknown bit of our life, to educate and share my pride.

Throughout high school, Ryan has competed in air rifle and smallbore rifle against hundreds of other youth across the state, region, and nation. Next year, he’s earned a spot on the NCAA rifle team at the University of North Georgia, and will be one of only about 300 student-athletes competing nationally at that level. Perhaps one of 75 or so freshmen. It’s an amazing honor.

Rifle is fascinating. It’s a rare NCAA sport where D1s, D2s, and D3s compete directly, and where men and women compete side-by-side, with and against each other for individual and team scores, which is awesome. Women dominate. Also awesome.

The NCAA champion this year is an all-women’s team. Eight of the top ten individual scores this season are held by women. A woman shot a 599 (out of 600) in the NCAA Championship this year, breaking a six-year record…held by another woman. Ryan’s coach the last two years, as well as his coach at UNG, are women who were top shooters themselves. It is wonderful for Ryan to see and experience all this.

Rifle is also one of the original sports of the modern Olympics, dating back to 1896, and remains one of more than a dozen shooting events in the winter and summer games. Also pretty awesome.

So, this is really, as someone once asked me, “a thing.”

From cold morning practices to clinics and matches across Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, the last few years have seen his weekends and summers centered on the zen of marksmanship.

Like all disciplines, it’s a mental activity first. Anyone can pick up a target rifle and shoot decently. They’re amazingly precise instruments.

But it takes a dedicated person who can regulate their breathing, clear their mind, focus on the precise placement of every element of their body, and hoist a 13-lb rifle onto the target, 20, 40, 60, sometimes 120 times in a row, with standing–the most challenging rifle position–saved for last, when you’re exhausted, running out of time, and fighting your own mental battle about how you’ve done so far.

You’re wearing a rigid jacket, boots, gloves, and pants, whether it’s 30 degrees in the ventilated range or 95 outdoors. You’re covering your nonshooting eye, limiting your field of view with visors and contraptions, watching your sights weave and bob over the two-inch target with every minor movement. When everything is aligned just right, you gently squeeze the trigger and follow through. There’s a light crack, a small tap of recoil, and lasers and computers calculate your precise accuracy. You get instant feedback on a small screen next to you. Sometimes that’s good, sometimes that isn’t. The unforgiving, running sum of basic addition up to a perfect 600 taunts you. You reload and do it again. And again. And again. And again.

It’s a discipline of intricate, near-obsessive attention to detail. The difference between the perfect shot and a mediocre one is barely bigger than a pinhead. Everything matters, every shot.

Rifle requires maturity, smarts, discipline, strength, fine motor skills, judgment, sharp vision, muscle, mindfulness, focus, and patience. It’s an unfair generalization, as much as any other stereotype, but rifle seems to attract a fair share of Eagle Scouts, as well as top students.

Is it dangerous? Define “dangerous,“ but no. It’s been yet another injury-free season on the team, but Ryan’s coach records plenty of missed practices because of football, soccer, or skiing injuries.

I worry about Ryan driving to practice far, far more than practice itself.

There are several local junior rifle teams. Yes, here in Connecticut. Many private schools, but some technical schools and even public high schools. When you look at the NCAA shooters from Connecticut and Massachusetts, you’ll generally find a connection to Ryan’s home range, Blue Trail Range in Wallingford, “home of championship shooters.” This year, to experience a top-notch electronic collegiate range, we joined a league that shoots at West Point; so humbling to walk its hallowed ground.

Although the sport is on the upswing nationally in recent years, there used to be many more teams. Explore old high school basements and you may find a rifle range, now sheetrocked into offices or storage. People barely older than me recall bringing their rifle cases on the bus to school for practice. Some local tournaments are proudly going on 80+ years.

I know this discipline zigs where some people zag. I’d say I understand but I truthfully don’t despite trying. Nonetheless, we have been aware of the need to be discrete, which is why I’ve generally not mentioned it. A shame that we’re at that point in conversation and society.

The misconceptions have been enlightening to clarify. No, his team is not “training to be snipers” any more than someone who does javelin is training to spear things, someone who plays hockey is training to shove people into walls, someone who does robotics is training to make a Terminator, or someone who dances a perfect Swan Lake is training to become a bird.

The coaches and facility at Blue Trail Range have been wonderful, steered him in profound directions, and connected him to interesting, caring people. I’m grateful. He’s found some good friends and mentors. He got a great part-time job, coaching younger shooters and doing physical work at the range. He comes home dirty and tired, but enjoying work. May we all be so lucky.

Never an immature kid, his better personality traits of responsibility and inquisitiveness have been strengthened, and coaching has helped him to grow, speak up, and lead. Not the type of “leadership” accolades we give out to kids like trinkets, but real responsibility to serve others through guiding them in serious matters.

Most importantly, because of rifle, he found colleges below our radar that offered him significant merit aid unrelated to the sport, as well as a few scholarships for collegiate shooters. It opened doors he didn’t even know existed.

Because of his aspirations to shoot at the NCAA level, he got practical experience interviewing and communicating with four very different coaches, selling himself, and working toward big goals.

There have been some fun and some not-so-fun moments, like everything. But it’s a great little community, in general, and it’s been a great experience.

It provides challenges for a lifetime, and his local league has more than a few men and women his grandparents’ age. Who, I should add, often outshoot the kids. He’s learned that asking “an old guy” for advice usually gets you pretty good advice, and they’ve been universally gracious with their time, guidance, and lived wisdom.

One inspired me, sharing that he thought the sport aligns perfectly with the quote from Browning (Robert, not John), “Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?” A writer, I couldn’t love that more.

The lessons learned on the range will stay with him for a very long time, which is why people pursue interests, isn’t it?

Think 10, as coaches say. Every moment, every shot, is a chance for perfection and redemption. And in target shooting, as in life, the small stuff is the big stuff.

Life, Professional

A Study in Failure

“If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster 
and treat those two impostors just the same” 

“If—“ by Rudyard Kipling 

In the last few months, I’ve been invited to several alumni-student networking events at UConn, my alma mater. At the rough halfway point of my career, how seemingly far I’ve come from my 1.3 first-semester GPA.  

The event planners gave me guidance for topics of discussion; a consistent one was to tell students about the path I took to get to today.  This exercise caused some thinking and reflection, which uncovered some trends.  

It is,  of course, nice to be framed as an example of a “successful” alumnus for future Huskies. In my prep, though, I came to realize that I’m a study in failure.  

  • I entered UConn as an engineering major—hence the 1.3—studying computer science, and I left computer science just as the need for that skill was about to skyrocket. I changed majors twice more.
  • I received my degree in journalism at the dawn of an era when everything sustaining journalism—circulation, business models, public trust—was about to collapse.
  • I did a double major in political science and was taking a class in Soviet political systems when the Berlin Wall literally crumbled. The professor came in the next morning, grabbed our textbook, threw it in the empty metal trash can, and said he’d support us trying to get our money back.
  • I went for my MBA later in life and was sitting in a corporate finance class in 2008 when, in the span of a semester, the markets spasmed like never before in my life, and the Great Recession began.  

By any rational measurement, my educational choices had been extremely unlucky, essentially following one fiasco—or missing one opportunity—after the other. On one level, I should be distraught. My education could be viewed a waste. Maybe my career in tatters, or never getting off the ground.  

That’s not happened so far, more or less. What I took from my experiences was an appreciation of complexity. I have learned to be nimble in some respects. Semper Gumby, “Always Flexible.” To pick my fights as things fall apart. And they have. And they will. 

Twenty-five years into my career, I have also learned that life is rarely linear and certainly not animated bluebirds and a glowing, well-lit path. “Success” and “failure” are ying and yang; two sides of the same coin.

Kipling was on to something. 

The art of failing that first semester had value. I’d never failed anything. Graduated near the top of my high school class, did good activities, all that. But I failed and failed hard when I hit college. I wish it was because I was having fun; the truth is I just wasn’t smart and adaptive enough. 

It was good training for everything since. We fail at a lot: jobs, the compasses that guide us, friendships, marriages, parenting, health, life goals, wants and needs. I fail in varying degrees in each of those on a daily basis. We let ourselves down, we let others down, and others let us down.  

I told the students to get used to failure, that failure is essentially the default setting for life. I don’t think they were expecting to hear that. Perfection provides few lessons for improvement. Failure provides them in buckets. Most of the time, I’ve learned. Sometimes I haven’t. I’ve tried. 

Failure is an important lens for me to explain my college experience and “path” to them.  My degrees made me who I am, in profound ways. 

In my liberal arts classes, I learned about so many topics I’d never even heard of. Anthropology, for one, which was far from my suburban upbringing. After that 1.3 GPA, it gave me the notion that perhaps engineering, all I’d ever known, was not the only subject I could study. The knowledge of the wider world opened my eyes. 

My political science education taught me that we are not all that special. That while not all systems of social and cultural organization are equally successful or worthy of emulation, the view of our own horizons is a limited one, which misses so much else.  

My MBA has been invaluable to whatever real or imagined degree of “success” I’ve had professionally. It opened doors, connections and opportunity. Whatever else comes in my career, I’ll always have those three letters after my name. On a personal note, I was a good ten years older than most of my MBA classmates, and I am exceptionally proud that I went for it, although it came at a price of missed Little League games and family dinners that I can’t ever get back. More failure. 

I spent the most time at these student events talking about my journalism experience at UConn. I am who I am because of this small department. I learned so much, like… 

  • Words matter. My professors were relentless in their criticism. Articles I thought were completely fine were judged far lower than completely fine. I was not rewarded for mediocrity. I was told to respect the reader.
  • Details matter. When you had a typo in your article, Professor John Breen took off a full letter grade. We were using very early Macs, and spell-check was turned off. You used a dictionary and the AP Stylebook, and you lived in fear of a typo. The small things are the big things.
  • Dedication matters. Breen told a story about a class assigned to cover a local town meeting. Most of the students left after the main agenda item. One student stayed for the whole meeting and was there to witness and cover a serious medical emergency. Everyone else took the easy path; this student was dedicated to the unglamorous work.
  • Emotion matters. Professor Wayne Worcester taught us feature writing and would play his favorite music for us as we wrote. Work and emotion are intertwined. It’s hard to do anything well without emotion.
  • Passion matters. These were hardscrabble reporters at their core. John Breen was about as close to a movie reporter as I’d ever seen. He used a manual typewriter. He smoked in his office. There were stacks of newspapers literally piled around him. All he needed was a fedora with a piece of paper labeled PRESS sticking out of it. He didn’t “phone in” to teach us. He was a reporter at his core and it showed his passion.
  • Critical thought matters. Breen was my professor for Newswriting 101. In the very first class, he told us, and I quote, “If your mother tells you she loves you, check your sources.” Think for yourself. Dig. Accept nothing at face value. In this day and age, when we are repeatedly lied to, manipulated, allowed to easily retreat into the warm bed of thought that is just like our own, this is a jarring statement. I would argue it’s the most powerful single sentence I’ve ever heard. 

Critical thought, passion, emotion, dedication, attention to detail and clear communications are invaluable in any life or career.  

I never became a reporter, never got into politics or law, and never made a fortune in business. But I learned to leverage different parts of all of my experiences to the point where I have had what seems on the outside to be a moderately successful life at mid-point. To that, I can only shrug and say, “We’ll see.”

Success takes many forms,  and the journey of life is defining what the word means.  

I’ve failed. A lot. I routinely do. Hopefully always will.

For better or worse, it’s made me what I am. 

 

Photo source: http://obstacleracingmedia.com
Astronomy, Leadership, Life, Professional

Together: An Essay of Tough Mudder, the Eclipse and a Tragedy

2 Comments

Image credit: Obstacleracingmedia.com

It started, quite honestly, with an off-the-wall idea, not the first one I’ve had with this longtime friend.

“We should do a Tough Mudder.”

Neither of us was in peak, or even great, physical shape, but one of us had done a few similar events, and the other had completed a half triathalon.

We both decided the Tough Mudder was a little bit scary, which, true to form, made it more appealing. We opted for the five-mile version, which seemed reasonable and still challenging.

Six months later, after countless runs, workouts, and videos watched, we joined thousands of others at a sprawling racetrack in central New Hampshire to test ourselves.

Neither of us knew what to expect.

I, certainly, never expected how much it would affect me.

TOUGH MUDDER

What transpired over the next several hours left a mark. Not only on my body, but on my outlook toward life and the challenges I face.

Some disclosure first.

It needs to be said upfront that Tough Mudder isn’t some benign social movement but, rather, a business and a marketing success story. It’s a physical manifestation of countless approaches to self-care that drive home the point that we have wildly untapped power within us.

I think it’s also fair to say it’s an escapist event for those with the privilege to indulge in it. The entry and assorted fees are not insignificant, more than a full day of work if you make minimum wage, and it’s well worth noting that within living memory, there was a time when something like it could not happen in our society. Countless people suffered—truly suffered, not the kind of suffering we experienced on the course—to allow all of us the privilege to participate together as one group. I don’t intend to make it seem, and it should not be implied, that the event is some social panacea, an afternoon of sweat that undoes everything else around us in this day and age. It isn’t.

And while Tough Mudder doesn’t particularly play up this particular angle, many other similar runs do focus on the military nature of their obstacles, implying subtly that it’s like going through the rigors of a warrior’s life. It isn’t that, either.

What it is, though, is truly amazing.

I cannot think of another lived experience that featured so much communal work and reward, with so many different types of people. Rarely in my daily life have I experienced so many slices of society as in the mud. It wasn’t a representative cross section of America by any means, but the Mudders I saw were a pretty eclectic group: young, old, all body types and abilities, and I presume a wide range of backgrounds, religions, political views and ideologies, working together toward a common goal of taking another step forward on the course, then another, to completion.

I expected pride in finishing. I didn’t expect pride in simply being there. The Mudder Oath, which we all took as a group, was a touchstone for a life well-lived: Help those who need it. Put others’ needs before your own. Don’t whine. Tackle the things you believe you can’t. Life is not a race toward the end, but a challenge to overcome your fears. Those fears will appear daunting and insurmountable and, often, when you have nothing left in you. No one can do it alone.

In the mud, like in life, little else matters but these ideas.

The course was painful, like life itself. Over obstacles higher than we thought we could scale, in disgusting muddy water up to our necks, with legs, lungs, hearts and muscle straining, we pulled each other through. No one asked who you voted for before lending a hand. No one pondered if the person next to them was worth their trouble; they were. No one forced or shamed us to help each other. Arms, legs, shoulders, bodies and words were freely offered to each other for support. My proudest moments were not when I overcame an obstacle—and I overcame every one with the group’s help—but when I helped others do the same.

It was a fantasy world, for sure. When we finished, we got our finisher t-shirt, headband, and beer, deservedly patted each other on the back, took some pictures, made some social posts, then got in our cars and drove back into our realities.

But if it’s a fantasy, it’s one I’d happily live in. It’s one I’m extremely proud to have finished. It’s one I will certainly indulge again. It’s one of the few moments in my adult life when I looked across a diverse crowd and felt…together.

In this vulgar, contentious day and age, it felt charmingly right.

A TRAGEDY

After a celebratory lunch outside of Boston, we returned to the parking lot where I’d left my car that morning, said goodbye, and made our respective ways home.

As I got on the highway, traffic stalled and then stopped almost immediately. A wall of lights flashed ahead. For a generally impatient person, traffic is frustrating. Add in mud, soreness and a long drive, and it’s over the top. I thought back to the Mudder Oath, and its “I will not whine. Kids whine.” provision.

The helicopter swooped down onto the blocked highway so quickly that it took a moment for the brain to process what was happening just yards ahead. This clearly wasn’t just a minor accident—the highway was now closed, in both directions. Car engines were turned off, windows rolled down, and slowly people opened their doors and got out onto the pavement.

We had nothing in common other than being stuck here, in a random spot on a random highway in a random town. Some left. A junky sedan and a luxury SUV were the first I saw to hit the grass and try to backtrack against stopped traffic to reach the previous exit. Perhaps someone was in labor. Perhaps someone just didn’t want to wait.

The rest of us talked and watched and, if they’re like me, pondered the costs of having one more bite at lunch, or one fewer joke with a friend, and being that person loaded onto the helicopter instead of a spectator, just by a sheer luck of timing.

The driver to my right railed on about aggressive drivers and did everything short of blaming the accident victim for society’s ills. To my left, a guy whom I learned worked in Manhattan talked weather with a young person with a Red Sox shirt and a neck tattoo. We marveled at how polite most people were…clearly those before us had let many emergency vehicles through, and there were now dirty looks given to the cars who set off on their own. Mostly, we looked on in awe at the fast and fluid motions of brave life-savers as they went about their business. The chopper loaded up, lifted off and soared over our heads. The conversations stopped, everyone returned to their cars, and we all set out on our myriad ways, rolling by a tangled heap of metal that had inadvertently and tragically brought together strangers.

THE ECLIPSE

If the Tough Mudder was togetherness by choice, and the tragedy was togetherness by random happenstance, the 2017 eclipse was togetherness in the context of our insignificance.

Astronomy is a humbling hobby. The vastness of the cosmos exceeds our tiny brains’ ability to ponder it. However, it can sometimes seem so removed from our life as to be disconnected. A supernova, for instance, one of the most powerful forces in nature, is merely a new and temporary dot in the sky. We can’t even see black holes. For most people, most of the time, astronomy is just something scientists study, nothing easily accessible to them in any dramatic fashion.

What I loved about the eclipse was that it was a stark reminder of the forces so much larger than ourselves or our species. We are, to quote Sagan, a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. A small moon momentarily moved in front of a small star, and the most powerful nation that’s ever existed was darkened, humbled and awestruck.

Together, we looked up at forces that we couldn’t control if we tried.

Together, we saw our source of life blotted out.

Together, we shared our experiences and our awe.

And, if we chose to think about it, together we could see with very little effort how completely fleeting and meaningless our existence is, and incongruently, how important our choices are in the brief journey of life.

THE CHOICE

My point to these three stories is that, ultimately, we all have choices every time we act. We choose to be helpful, divisive or inward-focused. We choose our tribe, our actions and our fates. We can choose to acknowledge differences, brought about by our respective lived experiences that no one else can understand, or we can imagine others are governed purely by irrational thought. We can choose to be humbled by life, or not.

We all have different frameworks around our choices, those frameworks limit our choices, we don’t have an equal set of choices or frameworks, and sometimes there are no good choices. But there’s always a choice. Always.

You can choose to help or you can walk by. You can choose to wait for others or you can believe you are more important. You can choose to understand your own cosmic insignificance or you can think you are bigger than it all. You can choose to tackle your obstacles or you can not.

And we can choose to be together, with all the good and bad it brings. Or not.

In the lexicon of Tough Mudder, there are “No Excuses.” That day on the course, every step, every hurdle, I had to examine the excuses that popped into my mind and mentally move beyond them.

I’ve since been struck by how often I think about my excuses elsewhere, at work, in life, as I go about my day. Excuses are easy. They can easily drive my choices if I let them.

What are yours? And why?

And what’s our role together?

Leadership, Life, Professional

Light

A joy of working in marketing is the chance to be creative, and I’m exceptionally proud of a series of new commercials that a talented team of professionals put together. It’s incredible to watch this process unfold, moving from child-like sketches of concepts to 30 seconds of “Hollywood” at the end. I think there’s a fascination of this among the general public; the ‘making of’ features bundled with movies give testament to it. It’s as if we want to see how the magician pulls the rabbit out of the hat. I never feel diminished joy in seeing the artistry behind video production, though. Rather, I feel a sense of awe.

This year’s commercials were shot by our trusted advertising agency, GO, with a crew that we’ve used before, so there was a certain degree of comfort involved. However, the day of shooting is always a draining process, starting before dawn and going until it’s done. Stuff goes wrong, you get in each other’s personal space a lot, the varnish comes off a bit, and because of the time and money involved, you all give everything for every second of film to count. There’s mumbled swearing, hopefully not much breakage, and a lot of coordinated and uncoordinated movement.

One of the professionals we hired was the lighting director, Chris.

Some analogies with light are easy. You light your own darkness in life. Sunshine makes the best disinfectant. Those are all true, but the beauty in light to me isn’t the power, but the subtlety. You can see it in Chris’s work and all around us.

I’m a morning person. I love to get up before dawn, make some coffee and watch the sun rise. My son and I recently camped, which I always appreciate but my sleep doesn’t. I’m dirty and uncomfortable and restless all night and almost always awake long before the sunrise. On this particular morning, I watched the eastern sky gradually change from dark blue to hues of red to a truly spectacular orange, pink and red mosaic. Photographers call this the golden hour, when the sun is low, soft and filtered through a thick layer of atmosphere.

Then, in the span of just a few seconds, the show is over and the sky bright from our star 93 million miles away.  The earth turns some more and the sun is risen, beating down with brilliance.

Chris’s work had that mix of brute force and subtlety. The brute force is the easy part. We shot the commercial’s last scene after sunset, in a glass-walled lobby, but we needed the room to be lit as if it were day. You throw enough wattage on something and you’ll re-create daytime. But the artistry and handiwork came in the tweaking; his constant adjustments to ensure the light was balanced, the right temperature, the right diffusion, coming from the right direction, with just the right amount of power.

He’d walk into a room that would appear to be your average space, make a few adjustments, pull out a few bulbs, add a few of his own, and the scene was transformed. Over the last few years, I’ve seen him in the pouring rain, balancing a giant light coming into the windows 15 feet off the ground to recreate full sun, or up on a table, removing a hanging light fixture altogether. In between adjustments, he’d hover over the monitor that showed the camera’s view, coordinating with the rest of the team and critically eying light in a way that seemed to be from the perspective of another dimension. It was awesome to witness, in the same way that it’s awesome to watch a craftsman make something out of wood, metal or material.

His professional world is fake and real at the same time. He manipulates the power that surrounds us, warms us, allows us to live, and reveals beauty, and he is also very much a person who gets his hands dirty, a trait I admire from my time outdoors and my own work experiences. At one point, as the crew tried to resolve a technical issue with the digital equipment, someone asked if he had any suggestions. He shrugged, said, “I don’t know. I deal in light, mud, rocks and rain,” pulled up his hood, and went back outside to check on rain-drenched gear.

In the end, the team made the magic. The camera operator, producer, director, actors, and technicians pulled off fourteen hours of work, grabbing twelve scenes at seven locations in two towns, which was all sent off to post-production, where another set of professionals worked on it for weeks. Thousands of minutes of work turns into fewer than two that the public actually sees. Chris and the team moved on to the next job. Maybe a huge rock concert, as was the case last year. Maybe an infomercial. Everyone needs light.

There were multiple lessons in that exhausting day. There’s craftsmanship all around us when we look. There’s beauty in natural light. There are countless subtle changes we can make to improve what we see in any situation. Brute power reveals—but experience adjusts the revelation of—the good and bad in everything.

And, sometimes, just like in camping, we should understand that great things can be seen through the lens of some sweat, light, mud, rocks and discomfort.

Astronomy, Leadership, Life, Professional

On Daring, Winning, and Losing

Originally posted on LinkedIn (February 5, 2015).

I did not know of Henry Worsley before last week, but it’s been difficult to get him out of my mind since. He died on January 24, just 30 miles short of his goal but after traversing more than 900 miles of Antarctica on foot, seeking to honor his inspiration, famed explorer Ernest Shackleton. Worsley was much more than an explorer, it turns out. He was a philanthropist, raising money for wounded soldiers. He was also himself a combat-decorated warrior, rising to the elite of the British special forces and spending a career on the knife’s edge.

Days after his passing, NASA observed a day of remembrance for their own explorers, the astronauts lost in the 1967 Apollo launchpad fire and on shuttles Columbia and Challenger. As someone who has always looked up, I was moved and impacted by the memories. I was there when Challenger launched on an earlier mission in 1983, carrying another explorer, Sally Ride, the first American woman in space.

A few weeks before Worsley’s passing, musician, actor and artist David Bowie left us.  It’s hard to define where my love of space—and my love of words—ends and where Bowie’s music begins. It’s equally hard to imagine that in a lifetime of writing, I’ll ever be able to create something that sums up living as well as the final verse of my favorite Bowie song:

And love dares you to care for the people on the edge of the night /
And love dares you to change our way of caring about ourselves /
This is our last dance. This is ourselves. Under pressure.

There is not much logically tying Worsley, the astronauts and Bowie together. There is no peer comparison to them, and I’m not trying to equate a rock star, astronauts and a warrior. They each can stand on their own merits. We are poorer for the loss of all.

However, while there’s not an equality between them, I think there actually is a connection of sorts, and it’s from the motto of Worsley’s unit, the Special Air Service.

Qui audet adipiscitur. Latin for “Who Dares Wins.”

I first heard the expression in college, coming out of a shell, finding myself. I thought it was fascinating and true. It fit where I was in my life, and over the decades, not a week goes by when I don’t think it. I’ve passed it along to friends who have asked me for advice on everything from coming out to dating to careers to life decisions. Some of them have passed it on to others. I have tried to apply it to my professional life wherever possible.  I’ve been blessed to work in environments that encouraged daring.

Life—actual experiences, not the day-to-day drudgery that makes days turn into weeks turn into months turn into years turn into decades while you blink—is about daring, isn’t it? Daring to cross that mountain, sail beyond the horizon, try something new when other things have failed, take that leap. Life is dangerous, scary. It’s easier to rest, take it easy, copy others, be part of the crowd, and we all have to do some of that some of the time. Daring is hard work. No one can do it ceaselessly or should do it thoughtlessly.

The astronauts dared, volunteering to place themselves in danger to launch into the heavens above, taking humanity’s dreams with them.

David Bowie dared, never taking the safe route in his art, always being just a little different, willing to reinvent himself, not often taking the easy path his fame and wealth could have allowed.

Clearly, Worsley dared. His whole life was “leaning forward,” running to the sound of the guns, sacrificing all for others.

Who dares wins.

Except, of course, sometimes you don’t. Sometimes, the daring causes you to be blind, short-sighted, stupid, and arrogant (or is it the other way around?). Sometimes you make that leap you shouldn’t. And people—at the very least, you—get hurt by your actions. Or worse.

Defining “wins” in terms of “accomplishing what you set out to do,” actually, you quite often don’t win. You quite often lose. But that isn’t the point, nor does it mean that you stop daring. It means you reevaluate your actions and goals, what you did, what drove it, how you can fix the harm done, and how or if you can move ahead. You are in debt to the experience and everything that got you to where you were and are, and thankful that you can even have those thoughts. You win through the learning, if you choose to.

And you move on. One ski ahead of the other, because the alternative sounds much worse.

You dare yourself. As Bowie said, you are then, in turn, dared to care about everything.

This is our last dance. Who dares wins.

 

Astronomy, Life

Space and time on Isle au Haut

Astronomy is, among other things, the study of history. The light from the stars of the Big Dipper, that most ordinary of formations, take most of a human lifetime to reach us. The Andromeda Galaxy’s glow we see tonight left 2.5 million years ago, when man’s distant cousins were barely using stone tools on Earth. As we look up at the heavens, we watch history arrive at our small outpost.

The stars tell a human history, too. Mankind has used them for practical, spiritual and recreational purposes since our earliest days.

All of this history is easier to see in some places than others.

20150814_093716

 

Six miles off the coast of Maine is Isle au Haut, a rocky, forested, 12-square-mile piece of heaven. Sparsely occupied in the peak of summer, and even emptier through the brutal Maine winter, it is mostly land that is part of Acadia National Park.

For at least ten thousand years, locals have plied its waters for fish, oysters, crab, bird, lobster and seal. Its prominent hills have likely always been something of a sanctuary from the mainland, providing a lookout that scans dozens of miles and hinting at the origin of its European name: high island.

20150814_080044

Today, that sanctuary is from tourists. The mainland portion of Acadia taxes the patience of even the most nature-minded with its summertime crowds and congestion. Isle au Haut is empty by comparison. There are only five campsites, reserved months in advance. A small number of day hikers join campers on the daily mailboat from Stonington, Maine.

It remains an ideal lookout, of sorts. Isle au Haut, an isolated island off of one of the east coast’s least light-polluted spots, is an exceptional place to observe the heavens. I was thrilled to learn in April that my reservation request for the 2015 season was approved and my preferred dates were available, coinciding with a new moon, the darkest sky and the annual Perseid meteor shower.

My son and I spent our first day on the island hiking and savoring the persistent smell of spruce and ocean. Every trail led to incredible vistas. A nearly cloudless sky gave way to a spectacular sunset just yards from our campsite and promised exceptional astronomical viewing overnight.

20150813_192842

We used the day’s last light to gather, cut and split more firewood and watched the stars appear overhead, one by one. Vega was first, then Altair and Deneb, forming the classic summer triangle. We sat and talked by the fire until light turned to dark. From a passing glance up only an hour after sunset, the heavens  revealed more stars than I’d see on the darkest night at my suburban Connecticut home.

2015-08-14 20.42.13

My son turned in early, so I knocked back the logs in the fire, grabbed a blanket and my binoculars, and sought a flat spot away from the embers’ glow. I rolled up a sweatshirt for a pillow and prepared for nature’s showtime in a near-total darkness unlike any I’d ever experienced.

At home, the quest for dark observing spots leads to absurd machinations, like finding a tree or bush to visually block a streetlight, or shielding the view of the road with a trifold school project board. On Isle au Haut, it involved walking ten steps away from the campsite. My prime observing location was rewarded nearly instantly with an Earth-grazer…an almost horizon-to-horizon Perseid meteor burning up in a long trail of fire and smoke. Then another Perseid. And another.

The sky was glorious. The Milky Way cloud band, stretching up from the south, peaked overhead in Cygnus and extended across the sky. Every passing minute revealed more detail as my eyes acclimated and sky grew darker.

You can see the cloud band in Connecticut when conditions are right; I have faintly observed it along the shoreline, and brighter in the extreme northwest and northeast corners. During the great power outage of October 2011, I saw it from my normally light-polluted front yard. However, it had never looked like this. I could easily discern the Great Rift in Cygnus and the shape and structure of the band. Through binoculars, it showed pinpoints from a sea of stars, so close together it looked like a quilt of light.

Over the course of the next hour, I saw a dozen or more bright Perseids, dozens of satellites, and countless astronomical objects from my mental checklist. The North America nebula? Visible to the naked eye; I had never been able to observe it at home. Messier 101, which I’d only observed in my best telescope as a faint spiral arm? It was a clear fuzzy circle through my binoculars. Andromeda? Larger than I’d ever think I could see it, and vaguely oval-shaped even to my unaided eye.

Typically, I am task-focused when observing; I go out to find specific things. Here, the pure joy was how much I could see when I was looking for nothing.

I had, more than once, considered leaving the binoculars at home for this trip. They are image-stabilized Canons; wonderful optics, but heavy. When you carry on your back all you need to live for a few days, extra weight is judiciously chosen. The binoculars were the perfect tools, allowing for wide, sweeping scans.

Trees to the south blocked my view of the horizon and our galaxy’s dense core, so I put on my red headlamp, grabbed my phone and binoculars and headed off for a short stroll to the rocky waterfront. The tide had rolled in considerably since sunset, and what had been a fairly easy walk in the day was a cautious, slow, slippery, rock-by-rock journey once I cleared the treeline. I hugged the narrow band of shore as it curved to the west, and after climbing over one large rock formation, there it was: Scorpius, Sagittarius and the cloudlike center of our Milky Way, stretching down to the horizon.

I had only dreamed of seeing the summer Milky Way from a truly dark sky sight, and it was every bit as spectacular as I’d hoped. Now horizon-to-horizon, the cloud divided the sky in a glowing, white path.

Credit: Christopher Georgia. More information at: http://www.space.com/21146-milky-way-national-park-photo.html

Credit: Christopher Georgia. More information at: http://www.space.com/21146-milky-way-national-park-photo.html

The Milky Way is pivotal in the heritage of cultures worldwide. It’s often described as the path to the gods, and understandably so once seen in its full glory. On the rocks, with waves crashing near me and our galaxy stretched above, it was easy to imagine our ancestors in this same spot, a hundred generations prior to the Europeans, looking up with the same sense of awe as they pulled their boats up high, cooked oysters on the rocky coast and made shelter for the night.

The miles of ocean to the mainland shielded me from any nearby light pollution but also showed its threat. A small glow, probably the town of Rockland, Maine, cluttered one small part of the western horizon. It detracted from the sky only in the sense that I knew what it was.

Photo credit: Jessica Hendelman photography (http://www.jesshendelman.com)

This is NOT Isle au Haut, but IS Acadia, and very representative of the views I had. Photo credit: Jessica Hendelman photography (http://www.jesshendelman.com)

I made my way back to the campsite and returned to my blanket. There was no noise, no light, just near total-darkness and the expanse of heaven overhead. A jet or two passed by on their way to Europe, and satellites crisscrossed the night, mixed in with Perseids, none quite at spectacular as the first I witnessed. Minutes turned to half hours and then hours, and after the third startled awakening from a buzzing insect, I realized it was time for bed. I made my way to my sleeping pad and kept looking to the sky. One last look. No, another. Ok, next satellite, and then I’m done, until one particularly bright satellite caught my attention, flared up a bit and then disappeared. I took it as a sign.

I stretched my hand out to the heavens, outlining it against the cloud band in what must have looked like a feeble attempt to connect, and went to bed.

I slept soundly, a rare thing for me when camping.

20150815_094038

On our last morning on Isle au Haut, we took a short hike over a low ridge, surrounded by wild blueberry bushes that visitors had missed all summer. I asked my son, “If you take your kids here in 30 years, what do you think it will look like?” He thought about it for a few seconds and said, “Well, I think it will look about the same, because it’s a national park.”

That’s the right answer, for all intents and purposes. The trails across this gorgeous island will probably be about the same…maybe rerouted around erosion, or shifted by the crashing of the remorseless ocean.

The fundamentals will remain. The night sky will not.

There will never be another night quite as dark as August 13 and 14, 2015. Stonington and Rockland will always get a little brighter in the distance, one light bulb, grocery and mini golf at a time. Other towns will grow. The spread of humanity, as unwavering as the ocean, will eventually blot out the night. It may never spread fully to Isle au Haut, and it may not even change much in my son’s lifetime, but it will advance. At some point, certainly within a handful of generations, we will cover the sky nearly in full with our light.

We will call it progress, and who can argue with the spread of light, of technology, and of electricity.

That progress does not come without a cost. For all but the last 200 years, what I witnessed on Isle au Haut was all mankind understood the night sky to be. A two-million year shared experience, across cultures and continents, gone in the comparative blink of an eye.

We’ve changed the balance of nature and with it, disconnected ourselves from the glory and magnitude of the heavens. It’s only when you see the night sky in its full expanse that you realize what a tragedy it is that we can—and so thoughtlessly—erase our own history.

The good news is that the history is still plainly visible in the most humble of places if you look, including a small rocky outpost on the surface of another one, both tiny specks in a mighty sea.

campfire

 

 

 

 

Leadership, Life, Professional

Check Your Sources – Remembering John Breen

2 Comments
John Breen, professor emeritus of journalism. (Courtesy of the Journal Inquirer)

John Breen, professor emeritus of journalism. (Credit: Journal Inquirer)

An icon of my life died this week.

Professor John Breen of the UConn Journalism Department left us far too early but also left a trail of students honoring him in their thoughts and posts.

More than anyone I’ve ever encountered, he taught me to love words. No matter my title or place in life, I will always be a writer deep in my soul. I have struggled to find ways to honor the man. Besides the obvious (there is a scholarship established in his name at the UConn Foundation), I have decided that the natural and right way to do so is through writing.

But first, I need a drink, and so a toast to him—a glass of Irish whiskey—sits beside me.

That I feel the need for a little alcohol-induced ease of mind tells the first part of the story about why John Breen mattered.

He was uncompromising. In the days before Microsoft Word marked all of your errors in red or, even worse, auto-corrected them, John Breen accepted nothing but quality. In one of his classes, he established a rule for assignments: for every typo, you lost a letter grade. Not a circle on your paper. Not a “fix this.” No silver star for “nice try.” He assumed you cared enough about your readers that you wouldn’t insult them. I feared the man and feared my grade. The lesson I carried with me was simple: quality matters. The small things matter. Detail matters.

I partly need the calming drink next to me to even comprehend the act of writing something about John Breen, for I know that this would probably end up with a ‘C’ if he graded it. That a grown man, a professional in matters of writing, can still feel this way should tell you something.

He taught me to be cynical. That’s usually a perjorative word, but I don’t mean it in that sense. Having bombed out of the engineering program, a 19-year-old me found myself in Professor Breen’s Journalism 101 class. On the first day, he told us that to be a reporter, you had to question assumptions.

“If your mother tells you that she loves you, check your sources.”

He said that. He really said that. It’s a remarkably cynical statement, but it is also remarkably true. I don’t think he literally meant that you can’t trust your mother, but the lesson I carried from it is held deeply today.

Question assumptions.

Assume nothing.

Inquire.

Dig deep.

Check your sources.

I know it is the trend today to talk about the decline of a liberal arts education; STEM education will rule the future. There’s some truth to that, I suppose. But can there be a better lesson for life, or a better education (in the philosophical sense of the word), than “check your sources?” With more information available to us than ever, can there be a better requirement for critical thought than “question assumptions?”

Lastly, John Breen taught me the beauty and grace of words. He taught me that my writing will touch people and that there is an awesome responsibility in the act of writing about them. This doesn’t mean that, as a reporter, you should go easy on your subjects. It means you should be fair.

He was a man who seemed to me to be out of place in the modern world, even in 1990. He smoked at his desk. He used a manual typewriter. If he could have worn a fedora with a small piece of paper on the band that read “Press,” he would have. He was more or less straight out of central casting for “All the President’s Men.” With stacks of newspaper everywhere, his office space always seemed to be one poorly thrown cigarette butt from a towering inferno.

I loved that.

The world is worse without John Breen in it. Today’s journalism students—while bright, smart and so capable—are poorer than I was. He last taught me more than two decades ago, but I feel him around me every time I write something.

And although I haven’t spoken to him since the year I graduated UConn, I suddenly miss him.

Leadership, Life

Leadership in the Snow

Spent the snowy weekend in the woods, working with young people on their leadership skills or, more precisely, watching them learn those skills themselves.  The formal curriculum was the Boy Scouts of America’s Introduction to Leadership Skills for Troops, but the lessons were learned as the groups worked together for the non-formal parts of the day.

And isn’t that exactly right?  Because there are a lot of “leaders” out there who sit through an awful lot of trainings like that (not to mention offer those trainings)!  And there are a lot of MBAs churned out annually. How many are truly leaders, in the sense of being able to work in a team, inspire others, and put the group above self?  Not many.  Not a huge percentage.

But what I saw in this group of 12- to 16-years olds was largely leadership. Like cooking dinner on a propane stove for their small groups, when it was snowing and their hands were cold and the wind was blowing.  Or making sure that the group assumed responsibility for cleaning the site and leaving it better than we found it. How many politicians or CEOs would do that?  Would they even call it leadership?  Would they recognize it?

And why not?  And if we answer that question, have we identified what is wrong with so many of our major societal institutions today?

It didn’t all go well. Some meals were barely meals. Some food was ruined. Some stoves took a long time. Not everyone pulled their weight. Tempers were frayed. Relationships strained.  Part of the lesson.  But, overall, I walked away impressed at what we show when we don’t know what we’re supposed to.  Leadership and integrity come when no one is looking, or when you don’t know enough to care whether someone’s looking.

Just a thought.

Life

Welcome to the new Sponauer.com

While I move my long-suffering and oft-ignored domain to a new platform and reshape its purpose, I would like to welcome you to a new and improved Sponauer.com.

In the Venn Diagram of personal sites, this one will be at the intersection of astronomy, personal notes on life and professional accomplishments.

 

It’s a weird ride, but how can you showcase yourself when you’re not sharing the whole person?

Anyway, buckle up and enjoy. And off we go.