Exceptional people

Others among the now less than 1,000 people left in Mars One's first colonist application procedure have been spending a great deal of time in the public eye. They have been featured in print and online news articles, on television, and giving presentations to schools among other things. I've had a local magazine feature done on me and a couple of online news articles have used me, but that is about it. One of the things that I would really love to do, though, is go to local schools and speak to young people. I'd like to teach about space exploration and Mars in particular, but mostly I'd like to tell the following to every child I could.

note: An odd thing that I do (I think it's odd anyway, maybe everyone does it) is think about things that are unlikely but possible. I spend an inordinate amount of time planning what I might say in this or that circumstance just in case. I thought of the following when planning what I would say to school children if I spoke to them as a Mars One colonist in training seven or eight years from now but I realized that it is just as applicable now.

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These days people seem to think that I am someone exceptional. I am one of a very few who managed - through a combination of coincidence, unmitigated gall, and some quality of psychology of which I remain unaware - to be one of the first of Mars One's colonist candidates. There is no guarantee that any of we, the 1058, will ever get to go to Mars, much less be among the first four, and yet we are deemed exceptional anyway. I don't want to downplay the situation, I know that of some seven billion people in the world I am in a group of a thousand who have been set apart, but I feel less that I am exceptional and more that I have an exceptional burden to live up to. For the millions who did not hear about Mars One in time, for the thousands who didn't have the audacity to apply, and for the hundreds who were not of the right psychological makeup I must be exceptional. I feel a need to be as great as all of those people think I should be. I will never be, but I will never stop trying either.

The question, then, is how do I become exceptional? This question is not for me alone either. I believe that every human being who lives - me, you, the guy down the street, everybody - can be exceptional and should strive to be exceptional. And the first step to becoming exceptional is choosing to do so. Whatever you do in life, choose to do it exceptionally. You only have a short time available to you and so whatever you spend that time on should be worthy of the cost. If you're going to spend your time being a nurse or an engineer or a physicist or a teacher or mechanic or raising children or digging ditches, get up in the morning and look in the mirror and tell yourself that you're going to do it spectacularly. Your time is short, don't waste it being half-assed.

The next (and most important) step to being an exceptional person is the thing that Mars One colonist candidates spend the majority of their time doing. By far we spend more time learning than in any other activity. In fact, even when we're doing other activities we are usually learning even as we do them. Mars One colonists are learning how to use new unfamiliar equipment, and how to repair said equipment, and how to repair each other, and how to grow food, and how to have good relationships with other people, and conflict management, and too many other things to list. We are constantly learning and studying and trying to grow. There was a point in time when a single human brain could hold all of the knowledge in the world. That time is long past, but exceptional people are people who continuously try to do exactly that - learn all that there is to know.

I hadn't mentioned this before, but being an exceptional person is only a three step process. Step One: choose to be exceptional, Step Two: learn everything you can, and Step Three: never think that you've gotten there. There's an old saying "You learn something new every day." It's usually used by someone who has just learned something when they didn't expect to. I prefer to think of it as a challenge to not be complacent. "You! Learn something new! Every day." You may be the best writer or cook or mathematician who ever walked the Earth but you don't know all that you can know and you never will, so keep learning and growing and striving until the day you die.

Focus

I've tried to live my life being mindful of how fortunate I am to live, and to live in such a beautiful place, and to live among such amazing people. Sometimes the troubles and stresses of life make it hard to pay attention to the wonder of it all so it's nice to have a reminder every now and again. The movie About Time was just such a reminder. I got to watch it - appropriately - with my family, and I recommend that all of you go do the same. It's brilliant.

If you know me very well at all you'll know - and if you don't you'll learn - that I believe that the key to practically everything in life is balance. Moderation. The middle path. This particular blog post is another example of said principle. The issue for today is happiness and how to achieve it.

I've lived with people from various economic backgrounds during the course of my life. When I was growing up my family was of a relatively low economic class, although that got higher over the course of time until we were a solidly lower-middle to middle class family. I've been intimately involved with a lady who, when she was growing up, was from a solidly upper class family. And I've been on very close terms with people pretty much from every part of the spectrum. I've found that there are different things that people of different economic classes tend to teach their children and in many cases those things are both helpful and harmful. For example, the poorer people are, the more they seem to emphasize to their children the importance of non-material things. While everyone mentions to their kids that interpersonal relationships, etc are important, the poor seem to get it better. This is a blessing for them because if you are hung up on material wealth as a key to happiness you'll be miserable as a poor person. On the other hand, if you learn the lesson too well it takes away a lot of motivation to improve your circumstances. There is a very fine line that we, as human beings, need to walk. A balance between being happy where we are and being motivated to change our circumstances to make life better. If we are too content with our place in life then we don't improve it, but if we're too focused on where we are headed we miss out on the beauty of right here right now.

This working for the future mindset is just one of the reasons that we miss out on happiness. Another reason is the today sucks mindset. This is that time that we spend focused on what is wrong with life to the extent that we fail to see the beauty that we are constantly surrounded by. Very young children are always a good cure for this part of the spectrum. When my daughter was very small - two or three years old - she loved to pick flowers and bring them to me. She was amazed and entranced by how beautiful flowers were in all of their gorgeous variety.

One of the ways that I can tell that Spring is on its way is from a particular weed that sprouts up. Driving through the suburbs in the winter you'll see everyone's perfectly manicured perfectly brown lawns. Toward Spring they start to get patches of green, but after a short while you'll notice that those patches of green are tinted with purple. Once those weeds (I've since learned that it is called purple deadnettle) start sprouting I know that Spring is not far off and everyone's perfectly manicured lawns will be perfectly green again soon. Well, the reason that children are a good reminder of the beauty that surrounds us constantly (and incidentally what I think Jesus was talking about when he said that we must be like children to enter the Kingdom of God [or, may I say, see that we're already in it?]) is because they haven't learned all of the things that we adults will teach them eventually. My daughter didn't know that the first bunches of  "pretty flowers I brought for you daddy" were just weeds.

I hate that we adults take their innocence and "ignorance" away from them, but that is a rant for another day.

So where is the balance between working for the future and today sucks? How do we maintain a childlike eye for the beauty that surrounds us while still maintaining a drive to improve our life? In my case it's not even that today sucks. It's more that tomorrow could be so powerfully awesome that it draws my vision away from the here and now. It is awesome to see pictures that Curiosity is sending back from Mars every day. It is incredible to read about the Mars Society's simulation missions. It's great fun to think about what we might do or see or eat or build or learn or whatever when we go to Mars. I realized after the movie tonight that I've had my head so far into that very very remotely possible (let's face it, even as one of the1058 I still have less than a 1 in 50 chance of being hired by Mars One, much less going) future that I have not been paying enough attention to how lucky I am.

Going to Mars will be monumental. Whoever goes - I and three friends, or someone else - will experience amazing things that no one else will experience in quite the same way. Just don't forget in the interim that today you will experience amazing things that no one else will experience in quite the same way. Tomorrow you will experience amazing things that no one else will experience in quite the same way. Every day of your life you will experience amazing things that no one else will experience in quite the same way if only you will be mindful and see what's around you.

Olympic Dreams

This will be less a blog, and more of a statement about how and why I choose to strive for the goals which are my vision of life ahead. I recognize that life and our actions within it are often a result of seemingly random things coming together at just the right time. This Olympian's Manifesto is a result of just such a confluence of a few things in my life recently.

Perhaps the first thing that I should explain is why the title Olympic Dreams. One of the random coincidences of life is that just now, when we - the would-be settlers of Mars - are beginning to work toward our goal, the Winter Olympic Games are about to start again. the Olympic Games are named after Olympia - the site in Greece where the ancient Olympic Games were held, but the name calls to mind Mount Olympus, home of the Greek Gods of mythology. This, in turn, calls to mind the Mount Olympus which was named for the Greek peak, but which resides several million miles away on an entirely different planet in our solar system. Where Olympic athletes might be said to aspire to ascend Mount Olympus to dine with the gods, we potential Martians aspire to live in the shadow of Mount Olympus (quite literally. the likely landing site for Mars One's colony is quite near to Olympus Mons) an entire world away.

The first thing to impact my life to begin these Olympic Dreams was not the Olympic Games, of course, the first piece of the puzzle was myself. I'm just a guy, no different from billions of others on the planet, except that I am what Michael P. Kube-McDowell described as a starhead in his book The Quiet Pools: "There was something simultaneously delightful and pathetic about the starheads. They knew the schedule for the center's one LTO runway better than most allied staff, knew the difference between a Pelican and its near-twin Martin Rendezvous, knew the nine satlands and the governor of the Mars colony and the latest news and gossip from Ur. They came to the ob deck at Johnson Field as a solemn pilgrimage and then turned into wistful wishful children, noses pressed to the window on a rainy day. ... The starheads were obsessed with dreams they could never fulfill, and so came to touch with their eyes the only piece of that dream they could reach."

The first thing to come into contact with the incredibly fertile ground which is myself was, of course, Mars One. Mr. Lansdorp, Mr. Wielders, and the rest of the Mars One team has brought forth a plan of such complex simplicity that dreamers like myself can clearly see that it cannot be stopped and its unstoppable necessity makes the possibility of my Olympian dreams - which had been cold and dead for decades past - coming true. Mars One has relit the fires that propel me and changed my life from a pleasant plodding from comfortable  home life to comfortable work life to comfortable band life and so on until I comfortably and pleasantly plodded into the grave into a life with passion and purpose again.

The thing that caused me to write this out for the world to see was the Metamodernist Manifesto by Shia Labeouf which I ran across yesterday thanks to twitter. Reading through that document brought to mind Mars One so many times that I felt a clarity of thought about the venture which allows me to express it perhaps more clearly now than I could have before, and so I shall endeavor to do.

My Olympic Dreams are a paradox as the Metamodernist Manifesto describes so well. Since Mars One began to be talked about there have been doubters aplenty who will go on endlessly about all of the reasons why Mars One's plans cannot be realized and they seem to think that we who have applied to be colonists don't know these things. They think that we are ignorant of the dangers, unknowing the obstacles, and in need of education about all of the things that will stop us. The truth is that we know all of what they are saying. We are well aware of the dangers. We also know that those dangers cannot stop us. We have embraced our informed naivety and go forth in a spirit of magical realism which no obstacles can hinder. This pragmatic romanticism is exactly why mankind has not been stopped in its grand designs of years past. When we embrace the paradox, we can go from nothing to a moon landing in ten years with less computer power than you carry in your pocket today. As the Metamodernist Manifesto says "Existence is enriched if we set about our task as if those limits might be exceeded, for such action unfolds the world."

So come along on the journey with us. Today we are the1058. Soon that number will dwindle until there are four of us sitting on a firecracker and then it will grow again as we populate another world.