| Learning more about myself and others
has been a lifelong pleasure for me. I have given hundreds of personality
assessments and values inventories in that pursuit.
When I heard Michael Salemon who has a Ph.D. from MIT and heads
up NASA’s Universe Project being interviewed on NPR recently,
I smiled smugly knowing I was going to hear a lot of information
and data from an analyzer. What I actually heard tilted my assumption
on its axis.
I heard a poet and a dreamer. He told the story of an astronomer
he had met as a child who told him stories about the universe while
he dreamed of stars and space. He quoted from Walt Whitman’s,
“When I heard the Learned Astronomer” then said that
he loved the poem but that Whitman had gotten it wrong. Whitman’s
poem makes the point that you can learn more about the stars by
looking up into a ‘mystical moist night’ than from charts
and graphs. Dr. Salemon said that you can learn more by doing both
— looking up in awe AND by diving deeply into the study of
the universe.
Here was a scientist and astronomer who had the soul of a poet.
He talked about a universe that was so filled him with wonder and
awe that he woke up every day as excited as a little boy first discovering
the stars and space. |
