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TIGHTEN THOSE CHIN STRAPS FOLKS BECAUSE HERE COMES A RAPID UNSCHEDULED DISASSEMBLY (RUD)

TIGHTEN THOSE CHIN STRAPS FOLKS BECAUSE HERE COMES A RAPID UNSCHEDULED DISASSEMBLY (RUD)

Please stick with this piece dear reader for it does not end on the same path from which it starts.

Being a child of the 50’s and 60’s, it comes as no surprise to anyone from that era that I’m a bit of a space buff. From the moment I saw my first televised rocket launch I was hooked and have never fully recovered from my childhood obsession. Beginning withProject Mercury and the suborbital flight of Alan Shepard in 1961, followed shortly by the three orbits of John Glenn, then progressing through Project Gemini where America practiced the space skills needed to eventually land on the moon and culminating with the Apollo Program and (supposedly) several trips to the moon, one thing they all had in common was the seriousness of everyone involved. Going to space was serious business performed by serious people. There was no joking around because failure wasn’t an option.

Who can forget the early years watching stern (mostly baby faced) engineers hunched over their monitors at the Launch Control Center in Cape Canaveral (Kennedy) and Mission Control in Houston, nearly all wearing the standard dress uniform of white short-sleeve shirt with tie along with the mandatory plastic pocket protector, headsets firmly affixed to one ear while the other was left open to hear those around them.

There were always several huge loose leaf binders at their side, dog-eared and well thumbed, complete with handwritten notations and addendums. And of course, endlessly pacing the back of the room or moving from one monitoring station to another, there was the Mission Director riding herd over his minions. There was no doubt by anyone in that room who the man in charge was and where the buck stopped.

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WAKING UP IS HARD TO DO

WAKING UP IS HARD TO DO

Do you remember when you first woke up, that point when it all became frighteningly clear to you? I certainly don’t, and if rigorous honesty is employed I doubt you do as well.

I make this statement with a high degree of certainty based not just upon my own personal experience, but from countless conversations over the years. Stated simply, ‘waking up’ is not an on/off switched event, but rather a process of slowly clearing away the fog of self deception and comforting illusion. Just as we do not instantly wake from our overnight slumber fully aware and properly functioning, so too do we fail to shake off decades of deep social conditioning and propaganda in an instant.

Sure, during this awakening process there are lightening strikes of clarity and revelation that stop us dead in our tracks while sickening the stomach and weakening the legs. The most devastating of these bolts from the blue are usually self revelatory and rarely joyful events. In fact I still suffer from these ‘First Light’ events to this day. The only thing worse than being caught naked to the world is to be exposed to our ‘self’ devoid of comforting emotional cover.

It is the height of childish thinking, something I am guilty far too often of, to believe we can wipe away in days, weeks or even months what has been carefully and painstakingly crafted within our psyche (what we think of as our ‘self’) over decades; our entire lifetime in fact. The ego does not easily concede its manipulative techniques nor lift its concealing veils willingly and without a ferocious fight.

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Olduvai IV: Courage
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Olduvai II: Exodus
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