Looking Back In Time from the Tropics

Looking Back In Time from the Tropics

I have angled my new Tropics office chair so I can put my head back to see the night sky, flip flops on, a tall gin and soda in my hand, and a steadily growing sense of real peace and purpose in my life. If I were so inclined I could try and count all the stars I can see, but I don’t have that much time left in my life. Even had I started forty years ago I would never finish. That’s how many stars are out there tonight. Bright ones, dim ones, planets near and far, and our moon. They are all there and still the same source of wonder, inspiration, and beauty they have been since I was a small child.

All light from space takes time to get here. The speed of light is one of the most fundamental building blocks of physics; it is a constant that never changes (mostly). To look into space, and into the stars, is to look a really long way back in time. It takes ten minutes for heat and light from the sun to reach Earth, and even longer for the outer planets. Light from stars takes thousands and tens of thousands of years to get here, but those numbers are too big for me, and this blog post. Looking at tonight’s stars, with the gentle lapping of the Atlantic surf ten feet to my right, provides enough motivation to indulge some quiet intergalactic thinking.

I remember a very clear winter’s night in my mid-teens when my father and I stopped in our driveway to stare at the constellation of Orion. We had been on our way to a neighbour’s house for one of the impromptu neighborhood get togethers that were a part of our lives back then. It was cold and we weren’t dressed for it, but we stopped anyway, less than sixty feet from our destination and barely thirty feet from where we started. He and I we were tens of thousands of light years from that driveway as we stared up at a landscape of blackness defined by pinpricks of brightness. My father traced the outline of Orion and his belt and explained to me the names of all the stars that made it up.

We stood there for a couple of minutes and he helped me understand a spot in the heavens. As children he would outline the big and little dippers and try and teach us more of the constellations, but astronomy was a hard slog for a kid who would rather read books, daydream in class, and watch TV. In those two minutes I was unknowingly given a great gift by my father, one that I still carry. He showed me that gentle communication of knowledge is more important than thundering pulpits of self-important thoughts.

Throughout his life my father and I would occasionally argue about many things of import to me. A lot of those arguments are long forgotten and so they should be. They were the inevitable kind that happen between a father and son. But not the one that I most vociferously argued and it was somewhat ironic that I would invoke Albert Einstein. My father was a very practical, pragmatic, and logical man, a man who grew up in the age of reason and logic, and very tight finances. I was a daydreamer, and lazy, and very introspective. I would never by the stretch of anyone’s imagination ever be described as academically inclined. Our great argument revolved around which came first the idea or the practical application. He would argue you needed money first, and I said the idea came first. As happens with most dreamers in such arguments I was losing handily until I recalled Einstein’s quote, “Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.” My father was unimpressed and failed to concede, but we always stayed friends no matter how much we disagreed. It wasn’t long after he passed away that I remembered that “discussion” and it struck me that one of my father’s greatest gifts to me was that moment under the stars, where he demonstrated the gentle breeze of wisdom against the blowing wind of knowing. It was in the quiet way he explained it, not just spouting facts and figures, then moving on. He tried to give it context.

Such are the thoughts that pass through the mind when they are given a chance to appear. Tonight’s stars are brilliant, and faint. There are some stars you had never seen a moment before, even though you were just staring at that corner of space, along with the more familiar stars and planets. The one’s you know by heart. The more my eyes grew accustomed to the dark the more lights I saw, and the more possibilities to see what I had not seen before. With some of these stars you had to use an oblique look, using both the rods and cones of the eye to get a better view of the dimmer lights. There was one collection of seven closely clustered stars that I could only see out of the corner of my eyes, an awareness it was there but not bright enough to fully coalesce into detail. Like a brilliant thought in a dream, the kind that fades before you’re fully awake to write it down.

A coppery green streak flies east across the sky, the flaming death of a space rock from “somewhere out there”. I make an outrageous wish, one with no hope of ever coming true, one of quiet desperation. It’s the same one I have made for the past few years. If you’re going to believe in such things always hedge your bets by making your wish truly outlandish so that if it does come true you can lay claim to a miracle. Then get on with your night.

There are many stars here I have never seen. That’s not really a discovery. I’ve realized for years that there are many things I might never see, but I am very pleased to get to see this. At home only the brightest stars and planets are visible due to a combination of air pollution and light pollution. Increasingly light pollution is in the form of some architects vision to light up buildings in some ego driven desire to exclaim to his mother, “Look Mom, I made this!”.  The rest of us are denied the inspirational and peaceful pondering beauty of the night sky.

Just over 200 miles north of where I lay is the place where America launched its rockets of exploration. From that place the human race thundered forward, and placed themselves on a neighbouring planetary body. It was an amazing time in the world. Thousands of people made that happen, and I am struck by a sudden thought, one born of experience, and a thought that best asks about losing one’s motivation, inspiration, and initiative. And I realize that every time one of those thousands of people suffered from a problem they couldn’t solve, an equation that failed to gel, a hatch seal that didn’t seem to fit, all they had to do was step outside and see the goal. The end result of their efforts was there to see, every night. There are more practical reasons to put a spaceport in Florida than motivating your workforce, but it sure didn’t hurt to place it where everyone could be reminded why they were doing it.

I even learned a business lesson from that thought. On nights like this my mind often jumps around to various places, and then lands someplace totally unexpected, only then to reform the thought into a reality moment. I realised that it had been years since the company I had worked for had managed to excite me about a corporate direction or goal. I remember vague platitudes towards explaining one thing or another, but nobody ever communicated where we were going. A vague goal of 2015 “your way” was floated up then disappeared. No updates that I recall, and even if there was nobody actually explained what we were doing and why we were doing it, or what product we were supposed to be creating. The entire company lurched along like that, and still does. It’s not just my former employer either, it’s rampant in business. You hear the same communication management spin words every day. Things like “strategic direction”, “restructuring to recognize client’s needs”, “rationalizing our manufacturing structure”, and such like. Reading about business these days is like reading the horrid cliché language used in sports reporting. It’s vague, non-specific, and frankly quite meaningless. It has become white noise, and nobody is listening.

Such language fails to inspire or motivate. One reason Richard Branson is such a leader in business is that he doesn’t, “leverage neutral language”. He speaks clearly and concisely to express the goals and expectations of his employees and the products they deliver. He doesn’t hide in his office; he leads meetings with intelligence, humour, and passion, and he’s got a company that’s going into space! I wasted a lot of my life in meetings with people who demonstrated none of those skills. That’s part of how I wound up here on the beach, under this carpet of stars.

The inspiration and motivation to put humans in space and get them to the moon involved looking up saying “that’s the goal”, and making sure every member of the team knew it. I was a school kid in those days, walking on the moon to me was a very real thing, an event that marked a point in history from which there was no turning back. It was an adventure that provided a parallel to my growing up, I was motivated by them, they were motivated by a challenge, and they were inspired to it by a goal and a destination they could clearly see.

And what they saw was space, the stars, the moon, and inspiration, all from here in the Tropics.