Shoot The Moon

I've been having trouble sleeping lately.... not quite insomnia, but I have been regularly waking up at 3 or 4 in the morning over the last couple weeks... It's pissing me off. 

I think what has been keeping me from sleep is a constant wondering of how I am going to move forward in certain areas... how I'm going to complete various video productions that I have lying around... how I can find sustained fulfillment as a creative person. 

I have been trying some new tactics... figuring out ways to get ahead of things in my day-to-day... budget my time more effectively.

News came over the weekend that astronaut Neil Armstrong had passed away. I was born exactly a year after the historic Apollo 11 spacecraft landed on the moon, and Armstrong took his "one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." I can only imagine what   the world was feeling on July 20, 1969... a sense of wonder and hope... achieving the impossible... especially after a decade that had ended so violently...



Instead, I grew up in a time where space travel and flights to the moon had become routine events... only perhaps fully realizing the risks involved after the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986. I have, however, grown up in a time of great changes and achievement... the development of the internet... smartphones... that boggles my mind, after growing up in the era of the landline phone.

I have had the opportunity to interview an astronaut: Story Musgrave flew several missions for NASA, repairing the Hubble Space Telescope along the way. He grew up on the Linwood Estate in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, which is now the grounds of Norman Rockwell Museum. When I interviewed him at the Museum back in 2004, Musgrave talked about growing up on the former farm property, climbing up trees and running tractors at an early age. He had a very peaceful and philosophical sense about him... something I gathered he might have acquired from viewing the world outside of our own. 

Apparently Neil Armstrong also grew up in a small town, mastering flight even before he got his driver's license. People talk about how, despite his great achievements, he was a humble and quiet man--he avoided the spotlight.

I'm interested in learning more about individuals who reach such heights... literally. What type of character finds a way to mount the insurmountable? Now that is humbling... maybe it is about just doing your thing... not giving up... operating from the gut. Maybe certain people don't have this type of personality... this level of intelligence...

One thing I appreciated from my wedding was when the rabbi listed the favorite things both me and my wife and had shared with her about our each other: one of Sarah's was my persistence... not giving up. That both surprised and pleased me, because I often don't believe it myself... get easily frustrated... lose sleep. It's easy to forget that even Armstrong had a co-pilot (Buzz Aldrid) to help get where he needed to go...



Related Links:

"Man on the Moon" (blog post I created for Norman Rockwell Museum), August 27, 2012

"Neil Armstrong, First Man on the Moon, Dies at 82," New York Times, August 25, 2012

"Neil Armstrong: Private Man, Public Hero," Life magazine slideshow