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Chris Hadfield is a Canadian astronaut who got more into the public eye than most astronauts these days due to an active twitter presence during his half-year on the ISS in 2012-2013. This is his memoir!
It's an interesting read, though it doesn't get super personal really. It's mostly just reading a reasonable guy chatting thoughtfully about helpful ways to approach living one's life. Who happens to be a highly-decorated and skilled astronaut, giving anecdotes about spaceflight and stuff.
And it means that my number one take-away from the book is.....what is it LIKE to be that mentally and emotionally stable and healthy????
This is absolutely a trait they select for in astronauts (for good reason!!) and then astronaut training puts a lot of effort into improving these skills too. So it makes sense that Hadfield would exude an aura of "chill competent with-it dude with a brain that doesn't act up." But my gosh. Wouldn't it be NICE.
Now, I'm not saying the guy's perfect or anything, like, you clearly need to have a lot of drive and ambition to become an astronaut, and if you read around the edges of the book you can see that all that drive focused towards reaching his goal put a lot of strain and pressure on his wife and kids. But you get the sense he's aware of the trade-offs he's made and made his choices with full knowledge, and did his best to mitigate the issues wherever he could, and truly listen when people told him there was a problem. And he also comes across as a guy who...would have been genuinely at peace with it if he'd put all this effort into living out his greatest dream and it didn't work out.
WEIRD.
(He's also the kind of person who, at 9 years old, realized he wanted to be an astronaut, realized it was a really really far-fetched goal, and decided that what made the most sense was to approach all of his choices in life based on what someone who would become an astronaut would be doing in that moment, figuring that it would be helpful if it ever became possible for him to reach his goal, but would still be useful to him even if he never became an astronaut. What the fuck.)
It's an interesting read, though it doesn't get super personal really. It's mostly just reading a reasonable guy chatting thoughtfully about helpful ways to approach living one's life. Who happens to be a highly-decorated and skilled astronaut, giving anecdotes about spaceflight and stuff.
And it means that my number one take-away from the book is.....what is it LIKE to be that mentally and emotionally stable and healthy????
This is absolutely a trait they select for in astronauts (for good reason!!) and then astronaut training puts a lot of effort into improving these skills too. So it makes sense that Hadfield would exude an aura of "chill competent with-it dude with a brain that doesn't act up." But my gosh. Wouldn't it be NICE.
Now, I'm not saying the guy's perfect or anything, like, you clearly need to have a lot of drive and ambition to become an astronaut, and if you read around the edges of the book you can see that all that drive focused towards reaching his goal put a lot of strain and pressure on his wife and kids. But you get the sense he's aware of the trade-offs he's made and made his choices with full knowledge, and did his best to mitigate the issues wherever he could, and truly listen when people told him there was a problem. And he also comes across as a guy who...would have been genuinely at peace with it if he'd put all this effort into living out his greatest dream and it didn't work out.
WEIRD.
(He's also the kind of person who, at 9 years old, realized he wanted to be an astronaut, realized it was a really really far-fetched goal, and decided that what made the most sense was to approach all of his choices in life based on what someone who would become an astronaut would be doing in that moment, figuring that it would be helpful if it ever became possible for him to reach his goal, but would still be useful to him even if he never became an astronaut. What the fuck.)
