“You know, most people think that the name Buzz Aldrin has some huge meaning behind it. Nope, he was afraid of bees.” – Frasier
What’s the difference between Joe Biden and Buzz Aldrin? Buzz Aldrin walked on the Moon. Joe Biden likes kids to rub his leg hair.
I think back to the builders of the European cathedrals. The construction of Notre Dame was started in 1163 A.D., not long after the Norman Conquest of England. Notre Dame was finished in 1345 A.D.
182 years. I might not even live that long, and I take vitamins and eat only a diet of meat that I hunt half-naked while armed only with stone-tipped spears. The people in Wal-Mart® have gotten a bit tired of the spears, but it doesn’t technically violate their weapons policy. And I use a Visa™ to pay, though they make a “eeeew” face when I pull it from my fur loincloth on a sweaty summer day.
Think about that. NO! Not my sweaty fur loincloth, the cathedral. Think about the motivation that it requires to get up every morning when the thing you’re trying to accomplish won’t be done in your lifetime. Or the lifetime of your child. Or the lifetime of their children.
That requires motivation. Also, I have no idea what they used for alarm clocks, and their humor-blogging infrastructure appeared to be singing marginally naughty songs about the local barmaid and complaining about how French they were and how they hoped the Germans would never invent panzers.
The Hunchback of Notre Dame sure had a twisted back story.
Motivation, though, remains key in everything you do in life, even if you’re not building a cathedral. One motivational mistake is to aim too high. When someone aims too high, they run the risk of being disappointed by results.
As I’ve discussed with one of my friends, he noted that research shows the most happy people in the Olympics®, overall, are the bronze medal winners. Third place isn’t so bad. Since I heard that the intelligence of dolphins was second only to man, that means Leftists should be happy, being in third place and all.
For the bronze medal winners, well, here they are on the world stage. They did really well. Were they close to winning it all? Sure, close enough to get a bronze medal. But, there’s the guy over there with the silver medal, so, he and another guy were better.
Most bronze medal winners can be happy that if they’d been just a little bit better, they’d have been in . . . second place. If they’d worked a lot harder, they’d have still been only one place better. So, third isn’t so bad. They might even get the Junior High Marching Band to lead a parade when they get home.
The silver medal winner, though, will always have it eating on him: what if he hadn’t skipped practice that week? What if he had pushed a little harder in the weight room? The silver medalist is plagued with a bushel basket of “what if’s” that will wake him up in the middle of the night. Second place is tantalizing. It is the story of near success, like England’s soccer team.
Helen Keller never saw a movie about pirates. Because she’s dead.
The gold medalist? It depends. In many cases, Olympic™ level athletes work for two decades to get the skill and experience to win Olympic® gold, to be, literally, the best in the world at something that no one will pay them to do.
Sure winning’s great, right? But what happens when the dog finally catches the car? What then?
Let’s move sideways a bit more, and return to one of my favorite people in history: Buzz Aldrin. It will all make sense in the end. I’m a trained professional.
Buzz was a guy who did a lot of things that were world-class. He went to the USMA at West Point. He was a fighter pilot who shot down commies in Korea, but still didn’t get to kill as many commies as Mao or Stalin did. He got a doctorate from MIT on rocket navigation.
And one other thing. What was it?
Oh, yeah. He was the second man on the frigging Moon.
That’s really cool. But there appears to be a downside to that. It wasn’t a just something small and fleeting like an Olympic® gold medal, it was one of the ultimate gold medals in all of human history.
Ever.
How do you follow that up? Get a Denny’s® Franchisee Award for cleanest bathroom in Des Moines?
I hear Santa’s bathroom is clean because he uses Comet.
Neil Armstrong figured out how to follow it up. That man was always kind of spooky and Zen and perhaps was okay owning a Denny’s© in Des Moines, selling Moons over My Hammies™ and Rootie Tootie Fresh and Fruity® pancakes.
Buzz didn’t figure it out, probably because his work in physics and killing commies did not prepare him to make a decent pancake. Imagine: Buzz was 39 and there was literally no way his life hadn’t peaked. Nothing, and I mean nothing he could ever do again would match up to what he did.
First a week passes. Then a month passes. Then a year passes. The hollow feeling inside of Buzz grew. How do you move forward? How do you top yourself? I mean, you could make a really great pancake, but it would have to be the best pancake in the history of pancakes. Dang. That still doesn’t beat being on the frigging Moon.
He was stumped. He had fame. He had the ability to get whatever money he wanted, more or less.
But he had peaked.
What to do?
Buzz crawled into a bottle. Eventually, after leaving the Air Force, Buzz even spent time selling used cars. Sure, that worked for Kurt Russell in the 1980 film, but Buzz was awful at it.
What’s the difference between a used car salesman and a COVID-Jab advocate? The used car salesman knows when he’s lying.
As near as I can tell, Mr. Aldrin finally pulled himself out of his funk. He finally decided his place was being an advocate for manned spaceflight, specifically to Mars. He even helped to create a transfer orbit to make a trip to Mars the most time-effective that he could envision. You could say that Buzz figured out the gravity of the situation.
That more than anything, I think, helped him. Buzz found something that was so big, so important, that he knew he wasn’t going to be able to do it in his lifetime.
Mars. A worthy goal for mankind. A goal that is meant for brave dreamers, for people who might want to change humanity. He had found his cathedral.
Again. Buzz had already done it once.
Mr. Aldrin is an unusual case – one of the highest achievers in a generation of high achievers. Many mornings I’m just glad that the alarm managed to wake me up. But I’ve had my share of success in the business world, reaching as high as I ever really wanted to go, doing the one job I wanted to do.
When Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong, and Mike Collins went to meet President Nixon after the Moon mission, Mike had to spend the entire time driving around the White House.
Where Buzz aimed high, perhaps I didn’t aim as high, but I still got there.
Then what?
My writing is a part of that. Where do you go when you have whatever you want?
You find something important, and you start building. You start building something more important than you. I think Neil Armstrong found that when he started teaching. Perhaps he got his satisfaction from helping the next generation learn.
I can’t be sure. Neil didn’t really say. He seemed happy that the attention had passed. My Apollo-gies if I got that wrong. And this isn’t about him, anyway.
The lesson I learned from Buzz was a simple one: have a goal.
Find a cathedral to build. Find something so much bigger than yourself that you’re willing to build it even though no one alive on Earth will ever see it through. Make it something that you can care about. Make it big enough that, at best, you can help build only part of it.
If you can find your cathedral, you will have the rarest of gifts: you will shape the future.
Remember, not all cathedrals are made with stones, and the best ones are built in the minds of men.
Why?
Because rent is cheaper there.
Plant a tree. Move a stone. Raise a family. Start a business. Fight commie pinko mutant traitors.
A better world isn’t merely a goal, it’s the process. Men need goals to really function in life.
They do. Blogging is a big one for me. The family is on the “kids through the tough parts.”
I have to admit, I cannot get at all excited about some of the things I used to worry about. Planting a tree? I could get behind that. Painting a house? Not as much.
But writing? I get excited when I’ve got a good topic up ahead.
Great post, John. THIS is why I think cosmology is important. Discovering the undeniable truth of the Big Bang origin of our Universe 13.7 billion years ago is a cornerstone of humanity’s ultimate cathedral. Nobody ever again needs to start yet another religion to deify yet another origin story because we have at last discovered the true one. Literally a hundred years ago in 1920 we were arguing over whether or not there was anything AT ALL beyond the Milky Way – the Shapley-Curtis Great Debate. NOW we’re mapping and trying to make sense of literally trillions of galaxies like (and unlike) our own, and understand our place in all of that. There is no higher calling.
This is a quest that has already gone on for thousands of years by astronomers in the past and will be continued for thousands of years by astronomers yet unborn. You personally can help today (and maybe get a better sense of your relative importance in this crazy universe as well, as I have):
https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/zookeeper/galaxy-zoo/
You don’t have to be a used car salesman like Buzz and get people to buy a multi-billion dollar jalopy so you can take the ultimate joyride. Who knows, maybe you’ll discover something like Hanny did.
https://daily.zooniverse.org/2013/09/24/hannys-voorwerp/
https://blog.galaxyzoo.org/2011/01/10/hannys-voorwerp-and-hubble-what-did-we-learn/
All she was saying is give peas a chance.
https://www.hannysvoorwerp.com/pea-galaxies/
Hanny and Buzz…building a cathedral in space.
Religions don’t begin in an attempt to explain the origin of the universe. Religions begin because people need a higher power to look up to, and to blame for all the ills they causer themselves. There is a longing for God in all men’s hearts.
Totally agree on all your points. But invariably the God(s) of most / all religions are also get as the Creator because that is the highest Power there is. Anything less defines them as Middle Management, not God(s).
https://historycollection.com/16-incredible-ancient-creation-stories-from-around-the-world/9/
If God(s) are invariably tied to Creation, and for the first time in human history we have an undeniable scientific lock on How Creation Really Truly Started, what better place to start looking for God(s) than the study of cosmology? Old scraps of sheepskin with ink on them the size of postage stamps found in some desert cave and now locked away in museum drawers?
I didn’t include the example of Hanny’s Voorwerp in my original post just to compare her to Buzz and show that ordinary people can make extraordinary discoveries that add to the “cathedral” of cosmology. Cathedrals are religious shrines and as such have things to teach about religion. To understand the religious aspects of Hanny’s Voowerp, you’ve got to understand what it is and read between the lines. Consider the picture of what Hanny saw…
https://dailyzooniverse.files.wordpress.com/2113/09/hannys-voorwerp-original-sdss.jpg
The galaxy in the background has a black hole in its center (as all galaxies do), and a gigantic blob of gas got sucked into it. This created an accretion disk around the black hole and a jet of radiation that blasted out of it like these two pictures from the Hubble Space telescope…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lc05JsCIm0
and the mind of George Lucas…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7g77WN6obk4
The blue object in the photo (“Hanny’s Voorwerp”) was basically another galaxy that just happened to be in the path of this black hole radiation jet. Because we don’t have a word in English that describes what happened next, let’s go with “it got totally fried”. You’re looking at a utter wasteland of galactic proportions, billions of stars and probably millions of entire civilizations like our own, past and present, that got totally wiped out. Just like Alderaan in Star Wars. Or Clarke’s The Star ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Star_(Clarke_short_story) ).
Millions. Of. Entire. Civilizations.
Wanna talk about a loving God(s) that cares about individuals and wants to hand out the gift of Eternal Life like lollypops to children?!?
Talk to the Hanny.
https://giphy.com/explore/talk-to-the-hand
A (David) Christian with something to say:
https://theconversation.com/big-history-why-we-need-to-teach-the-modern-origin-story-10405
https://www.amazon.com/Maps-Time-Introduction-Big-History-dp-0520271440/dp/0520271440/ref=mt_other?_encoding=UTF8&me=&qid=
The Voorwerp wasn’t killed – it was aborted. Those “civilizations” of which you postulate never existed in the first place, because their stars and planets never formed.
Go proselytize your Atheist religion at someone else.
I like the idea of knowing. But I like the idea of spreading out in all that real estate even more.
Hey.
My cathedral, by my choice, is my family. They’ve always come first, and I have to say I am pleased with the result. Now that my boys are 29 and 41, I am a bit at loose ends, as they are independent and raising their families. That’s how I raised them to be. I get plenty of time with the Gkids too.
The world is currently so f’ed up that any long term goals seem unrealistic to me. I can’t even confidently predict what the world will look like in 3 months. I continue with my original focus though, because those kids ARE the future, as far as I’m concerned.
I’ve come across a couple of resources regarding the Covid mess that are worth posting. First is a video of a fellow who works for an international patent company detailing the development of the virus and vaxx. If the legal system hadn’t been captured, it would be sufficient to put many of the malefactors in prison.
https://www.bitchute.com/video/6CwPxp9kTYWH/
The second is a large pdf that is the most thorough treatment of the vaxx situation that I have found. If I post the link, it will put the whole PDF here, so I will put a space before the last ‘f’. Paste it into your browser, then delete the space and search it.
https://trialsitenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Vaccine-safety-FAQ-1.pd f
I suppose that resisting the current play of the would-be tyrants has come to mean a good deal to me, and stands alongside my family as my ‘cathedral’ these days. In many areas, it is the same thing.
Good luck to all the white-hats.
They will always want your advice.
I was going to write about the ‘Rona for Friday’s post, but to be factually correct I can’t start it as late as I did. The “jab” appears to be (to me!) far riskier than has been admitted.
For people under 50, the “vexxine” is at least as dangerous as the disease.
For people under 30, the vexxine is 10x as dangerous as the disease.
Thou shalt not sacrifice the young on the alter of the old.
10/10. And I was reading about the “clotshot” being required to . . . “protect the children”
White lightning?
.
Toledo, Ohio.
A memorial mural dedicated to martyr george floyd was instantly incinerated during a thunderstorm yesterday.
.
Building requires thought plus action.
Destruction skips the first step.
.
.
Capetown, Suid Afrika.
Three days of rioters destroying their neighborhoods — again — saw impromptu militias supplying ammunition and medical supplies to trapped LawEnforcementOfficials after the central government (known as “mandela-land’) collapsed — again.
OfficialsAndAuthorities of mandela-land responded by issuing a terse “condemnation of European carbon-neutral requirements by 2060″… as they boarded chartered UN cargo planes destined for tax-havens with non-extradition treaties.
.
(Maybe not that last part)
White privledge lightning.
South Africa is just getting worse. I thought it was going to blow over, but with the supply chain destruction and infrastructure “mess” this might be the spark before the final conflagration.
Goals are certainly important. But at this stage of my life, I prefer to focus on the remaining journey rather than the endgame. Goals are left vague on purpose, and living in the moment is paramount. Big dreams crashed and burned because they were too big, so I’ve learned to take joy in the small things.
Increments. One day at a time. Family, friends, lived experiences. No more marathons for me, just small sprints from one way point to another. Sometimes that is as simple as merely surviving for another day. As so many others point out, the world is in an awful mess now, and the only sure thing is that nothing is as it used to be.
I have high hopes for a return to normalcy, however, even though I likely won’t be around to see it. A return to the sanity of recognizing but two genders and the sanctity of marriage between a man and a woman. To government of, by and for the people. To protecting the children, rather than using them as human shields or, worse, battering rams. To relatively peaceful, if uneasy, coexistence between the various diverse groups occupying the land. It’s not only possible, but inevitable that the clownworld that has been forced on us will collapse. Nothing so evil and bizarre can stand for long.
Thousands of years of human history versus the crazed ranting of Leftists? Bet on the thousands of years of human history.
Life is meaningless without something to strive for. Great posts always made even greater with a Rudy Russo reference
Thank you! An all time classic movie.
It’s good to have a goal. It’s bad to have an unattainable goal. Knowing the difference is important.
*it need not be attainable in your lifetime
Well said, sir.
Thank you, sir.
Buzz Aldrin also throws a good punch.
He does! And he’s not a big guy!
The reason the cathedral builders could take the time were
They were paid.
They considered the work had eternal value.
Buzz, not so much.
Heh. There was a time Buzz would put his name on anything for the cash.
I have the best daughter in the world because:
their [12th C] humor-blogging infrastructure appeared to be singing marginally naughty songs about the local barmaid …
Said infrastructure is known to include writing poetry about partying, and preferrering to get drunk and write sorry-not-sorry rhymes in Latin instead of learning how to soldier while also making excuses for being a drunken wastrel of a philosopher. (http://www.thehypertexts.com/archpoet.html)
And she not only found it for me, and translated part of it with me, she learned it off lines 40-85 by heart and goes about singing it to the tune of Yankee Doodle Dandy. (Quod est notum satis)
Ha! I love it!!!! Send me some lines!
Hunting with a spear and a sweaty loincloth at Walmart? Good choice. If you had tried that at Costco they’d have made you wear a mask…
Hahahahaahahaha
The Norman conquest of Britain was in 1066, so it was 97 years later that they started to build Notre Dame. I can’t hold my breath that long, so I don’t call it soon after.
Point well taken! I’ve written about time compression myself, and here I am doing it.
I’ve occasionally wondered if a sufficiently important purpose could keep one alive indefinitely. We know that a man without a purpose isn’t long for this world. What if the contrapositive were also true?
Okay, now there’s a story you need to write!
Wait! What? Walmart has weapons policy?
I used to hope for a better world, but now I only want to see the bastards responsible come to their just and bloody end. How’s that for a long term goal?
Make it your goal to go out of this world as you came in: naked and covered in someone else’s blood.
Sounds sexy. Speaking of which, a goal of mine actually, to communicate telepathically to those who write well, to add more bikini graphs to their posts!
Doh! Yes. I promise.