The true dream‑makers

Are you living your dream? The answer, Dear Readers, seems to predict health, wealth and happiness. People, who are living their life to the fullest and live as large as their dreams, seem to be the true winners in the world. When I was a little girl, I dreamed of being an astronaut. Well, I haven’t been to space (although my husband claims I’m spacey), but have managed to adjust my vision of exactly what comprises a good life. And after seeing the sad debacle of the “astronaut gone crazy,” I think space travel is not all that it’s cracked up to be.

What the heck happened to Lisa Nowak? A remarkable career, one of the cream of the crop in the NASA program, living the dream of maybe a billion people, a role model to girls (and women) everywhere, and she throws it all away because of a man? Yikes, she singlehandedly set the Women’s Movement back one hundred years. This is one strange and sorry story.

Have you ever gone on a road trip cross‑country? I have, and there is a lot of windshield time to seriously ponder things like, where you’re heading and what you’re doing in this life. This astronaut was definitely on a crazed mission. She drove nine hundred miles (wearing diapers) so she could confront a female Air Force engineer who Nowak thought was stealing the affections of a man. Wearing a wig and armed with pepper spray, Nowak confronted the other woman, with what now seems to be murderous intent. How the heck did someone who flew so high, go so low?

Nine hundred miles is a long time to consider what you are about to do. If the thoughts of a husband and three children aren’t enough to turn you around, what about the career you dreamed of since the age of five? One of my friends is a psychologist and thinks that Nowak had a complete and total breakdown. Somehow, the sordid details of this made‑for‑television love triangle is a tragic reminder that very successful people, at the top of their game, can (and evidently do) go off the deep end.

Maybe we measure our own mental health by those we admire. Our role models have all the warts and flaws that make them human, but we prefer to only look at their stellar achievements. Success is an attraction, a shining light that gets our attention, a motivator to help push us to be our best. When one of the brightest among us crashes and burns, maybe we, the common spectators, lose a little of our faith in our brilliant stars.

I suppose the moral of the story is that we need to look for our role models and heroes in the family member, friend or neighbor next door. That hard‑working single mom who works all day and then merrily spends every free minute at her kid’s soccer games and baseball tryouts is the real achiever. The people who take one hundred bikes down to Mexico to disperse them to the kids who have nothing, are the true dream‑makers.

Well, thanks to news and the weird behavior of one astronaut, we’ve all been able to watch a human train wreck. Time to take a deep breath, rethink who our heroes are, and look with caution at bright flames in the sky. Should little girls dream of  becoming astronauts? You bet! ”