Endurance

After finishing New York, 2140, I began reading Endurance,A Year in Space, a Lifetime of Discovery by Scott Kelly.  For those of you unfamiliar with Kelly, he spent a year on the International Space Station (ISS) as part of a joint American-Russian experiment to study the effects of long term space travel on the human body.  This information is critical, if we are to seriously expect to travel to Mars. 

I finished Endurance yesterday, and began reading Jimmy Carter's Our Endangered Values today.  Also, over the weekend, I spent some time reading the Mueller report.  My plan is to comment on Endurance in this post, then link my impressions of ex-President Carter's book with my interpretation of the Mueller report for my next post.  If all goes according to plan, I am composing a letter to President Trump which I hope to post sometime next week.

Endurance is a remarkable example of what humans are capable of, both individually and communally.  While Kelly clearly possesses an above average intelligence, sense of purpose and ambition, he also comes from an ordinary background in which he was not blessed with the automatic access to the best opportunities.  He is very honest in his descriptions of an early academic career marked by less than stellar performance.  His recollection of floating through school without purpose is indicative of so many of us.  There is no indication to his parents or teachers that he had the internal strength and discipline to embark on a career of such remarkable achievement.

What is special about Kelly's story is that he knows precisely when his life turned on a dime.  He can recall the exact moment when he was inspired to be more than he was, when his goal became clear, his life purposeful.  That in itself makes Kelly an unusual person, let alone the fact that despite some setbacks and obstacles, he achieved his goal, and then, surpassed it.

Just from that standpoint alone, the book is worth reading.

I also enjoyed Kelly's forays into philosophy and reflection.  There is a point during the end of his year-long stay on the ISS, that he allows himself to begin thinking about returning to earth,  He had made a pointed effort to not look forward too much to that day, in fact, counting up from the day he arrived, as opposed to counting down to the day he would return to Earth.  But when asked by his partner to make a list of the things he wanted on his first days back, Kelly allows himself to mentally wander beyond the physical things he misses to the more emotional, social, even spiritual feelings and thoughts that are connected to those things. 

And then, surprisingly, to the things he would miss about his year in space.  I say surprisingly, not because he was unhappy in space, but because much of the book was about all the things that are different in space as compared to our gravity driven lives on Earth, and these differences are what is so challenging about our contemplation of travelling to Mars, or beyond.  He appreciates the moments he has spent on ISS, and not just because of the historical nature of them, but because they now have become a part of who he is, and that those moments, in combination of everything else he experienced beforehand, will become part and parcel to his future life.  He reminds us that our own lives are an accumulation of experiences, good and bad, challenging and mundane, ecstatic and tearful, but that the key is to acknowledge that they all combine to create the person we see in the mirror each day.  And to embrace them all with the thought that at some future time, one of those experiences will be our last.

As elementary as the whole be-here-now philosophy can seem, the simple fact is that everyday, thousands of people wake up for the last time, experience their last meal, last laugh, last kiss, last words to their loved ones.  We shouldn't need a year in space, where the least little thing could morph into a life-threatening, or life-ending event, to realize how important it is to live our days with meaning.

My last takeaway from Endurance was Kelly's emphasis on cooperation.  He is quite generous with his acknowledgement that his personal success was assisted in countless ways by the various people in his life and that his success in many ways is a testament to this assistance.  There are far too many successful people who seem to have forgotten such assistance in their own lives. 

He also repeatedly extols the virtues of international cooperation, labeling the ISS as the greatest cooperative achievement in the history of mankind.  At one point he reminds us that the various modules that make up the space station, were created independently by the engineers and scientists of various countries, and yet they fit together perfectly once assembled in space.  Think of it as a puzzle with pieces manufactured in different plants throughout the world to create an object greater than its parts, flying at 17500 miles per hour around the globe with humans within, their lives depending on each part being created in exact harmony with the others to assure their survival.  That kind of  cooperation needed to be flawless!

Now imagine such cooperation in the effort to eliminate world wide poverty, or to address climate change, or to seek peace rather than conflict.

The good news is that we know it can be done.  The bad news is that we can't seem to set aside our differences, and lust for power, and fear of the other, to make a concerted, unified effort.

If nothing else, Endurance is a book of hope.  Hope that we can learn from such an example of cooperation with and understanding of people different from ourselves, hope that we can create a world which allows all those born upon it to have such opportunities, and hope that by seeing planet Earth from space, a simple blue marble in the vastness of the universe, we might realize how precious all life is, and how critical it is for us to work together to appreciate, sustain and enhance this fragile existence.