I know, I write a lot about one particular band, but I really like this lyric (the title of this post), and it got me thinking — what is my "walk on the moon"? What is the most revolutionary, amazing accomplishment of my life? Is it submitting patent applications? Getting my Masters degree at 40? Having papers published at international conferences? Having a child? Or having a great marriage after 10 years?
Those are all tremendous accomplishments, and those are the things that I'm most proud of in my life, but I just read Randy Pausch's book, The Last Lecture, and that's influencing my thinking. Randy was a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon when he was asked to give a "last lecture" — a talk on what he learned in his life as though he were at the end of it; except that he really was at the end of his life, because, unbeknownst to the college at the time of it's asking, he'd been told that he only had a few months to live. He had three children who were all under the age of 6, so he used the last lecture to try to tell his children who he was, and what was unique about him.
So while I am immensely proud of the work I've done, of the child I've brought into the world, and the marriage that I've nurtured, those things don't make me unique. What Randy decided made him unique was that he had achieved his childhood goals. I suppose that is something I share with him.
No, I didn't always want to be a user experience engineer :) But I remember a letter that my kindergarten teacher wrote when I graduated from high school — she talked about how at age 4 and 5 I would help the other children with academic work. Yeah, I know, that was like the alphabet. Then in first grade, I was appointed "student teacher" to mentor my classmates through difficult math problems. In college, I tutored English, Calculus, Statistics, and English-as-a-second-language. After college, I volunteered to teach adult literacy. And the list goes on ... until this past month.
This past month, I asked my former graduate adviser if I could have permission to launch and run a new program — a mentoring workshop series to help students and alumni to get their work published in a professional journal, magazine, or presented at a conference ... and he said "yes". So we start next Thursday, with a panel of 7 speakers, and 20 participants. It's not a class. There's no grade. I won't get paid. But this is my one small step — this is my walk on the moon.