For me one of the highlights of last evening’s New Year’s Eve celebrations was the message from the International Space Station (ISS) by Tim Peake, the first British astronaut officially sent to the ISS by the British government. Since he was first launched up there, an event eagerly anticipated and watched by all of us here in the UK, he has already phoned home a couple times from the ISS, once to get his parent’s answerphone and once to a wrong number when he was roundly hung up on by the lady answering who thought it was a prank call—indeed a reasonable assumption!
Delivering his New Years wishes for 2016 after having first informed those of us watching in Britain that he’d be celebrating New Years at the same time us since the space station was on Greenwich Mean Time, Peake gleefully performed his first public somersault, something for which he’d been practicing for days. Here is a man who clearly loves what he does. He is living his dream and is fulfilling his passions born and realized over a lifetime. He is up there having the time of his life! As I watched him with more than a slight twinge of envy, I was again reminded that life is too short not to be doing what I love and not doing what fuels and nurtures my dreams and passions.
So for me 2016 is about new beginnings for me and a new journey, actually a new stage of the journey I’ve already always been on, to realize my dreams and work from my passions and ambitions. More about that in a moment.
One of the most inspiring things to me, having grown up in the Space Age where Apollo rocket launches became common place, is human space exploration. Having watched the first moon landing as a young child, the seeds for my sense of adventure and the sense that all was possible was planted and nourished. This past summer, I was privileged to visit Kennedy Space Center in Florida, more years later than I care to acknowledge after my first visit there as a young adult. Rather than being merely a museum to prior space travel, the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral is now billing itself as America’s first spaceport. It is a busy place, full of active launch sites for NASA and other private space companies located there. Star Wars and Star Trek are becoming into being almost during my lifetime!
In the intervening years, space shuttles missions (no mean achievement) have come and gone and launches to the International Space Station have become an almost a daily event. In fact, we now have the problem of space trash littering the orbit of the ISS! Imagine my surprise during this last visit when I realized that human space exploration was back on the agenda and that human travel to Mars is not only a dream, but is actively being planned and staged. Over the next 3 decades, there are partnerships between NASA and private companies like Space X to achieve this dream. I bought a mug with a slogan that symbolizes this new spirit of space travel and captures my own dreams and ambition which were first planted and nurtured by those early Apollo missions to the moon, “Occupy Mars.”
Whilst I don’t necessarily like some of the more negative aspects of colonialism the statement conjures, I heartily embrace the positive sentiments implicated in the statement; it is possible to dream and then even achieve the impossible and not to do so means living an impoverished life. Because President John F. Kennedy made the audacious statement in the early 1960’s that he wanted to send people to the moon by the decade’s end, I’m now looking at the possibility, should I be alive in 30 years time (something that is certainly possible if not probable) I may actually witness people landing on Mars! Who knew! Cheers to all the women and men, pioneers, that have made this impossible dream possible!
Although I am probably too old to become an astronaut, well at least I think I might be and unless NASA is recruiting middle aged women to travel into space (I know they are recruiting for the first time in years….hey NASA you need a moral philosopher and ethicist don’t you? I’m your woman, pick me!) I am finally gathering up the courage to once again, after almost a ten year hiatus, to more actively and directly follow the dreams and passions that have been with me since I was a young girl— a passion to address issues of injustice and to help those less fortunate.
2016 will be about exploring the dream that my husband and I scribbled one evening on our fridge one night a couple years ago, using the fridge as a whiteboard. The basic dream and passion is to establish a company or a kind of social enterprise that will promote greater flourishing for those who are currently suffering, whether from all kinds of domestic abuse (including trafficking, female genital mutilation, early forced marriage and honor based violence), mental health issues, poverty, displacement, or lack of opportunities for some to develop and achieve their potential.
Stay tuned as the journey continues to unfold, a journey that I’ve actually always already been on, an iterative one that spirals and winds to destinations unknown. The next phase of this journey becomes clearer by the day and requires daily courage. I’m doing it scared, but taking the next step and then the next. Am I crazy or what? I know well the potential pitfalls of becoming an entrepreneur and setting up a company of one’s own. Time will tell.
What is your passion and what journey will you be pursuing in 2016? Share your dreams here. This blog is a safe space, moderated so that people can share their thoughts openly and be encouraged.