How can you transfer a feeling?

What does transferring a feeling look like?

Me the first 35 years of my life: “What's the big deal about going into space? “

Me as of 11am July 20, 2019 (aka one Saturday last summer when they were celebrating 50 years since we walked on the moon):[mind suddenly blown] “I hope I have the opportunity to see the earth from space before I die.” 

What changed?

Did I watch an interview with Elon Musk or Richard Branson? Did watching a million replays of a spaceship taking off to outerspace make me weepy?

No. 

Someone sold me a feeling, and he wasn't even trying. 

On that Saturday, I got back into my car from running an errand, and the radio station I had on (a jazz station of all things) was in the middle of running an interview with Eugene Cernan, the last man to walk on the moon—and one of only a dozen of men on the earth to have ever done so. 

The feeling I felt as I listened to that excerpt— totally unintentionally, an accidental encounter—will forever change the way I consider the opportunity to see Earth from outer space. 

Why? Because somehow, without even trying, Gene Cernan sold me the way I might feel on the other side of the experience.

He didn't sell me on the "thrill" of being in a seat and taking off. That feels like a thrill seekers agenda. 

He didn’t sell me the science, or the exclusivity, or the experience of floating weightless.

He sold me a feeling.

He sold me on the stillness, the gentleness, the love, and the soul-filling knowledge that comes after having seen the earth from outerspace.

All the fear, all the strangeness of even considering what it might be like to be an astronaut or pay $100,000 to be on a rocketship fell away. 

And I found myself longing to view creation in the poetic way he described it. To not chase the thrill or the science, but the sheer, unimaginable magnitude of what I would feel as I considered my own existence from that vantage point. I imagined it might be like standing on top of a thousand mountain peaks at once. 

That weekend, for the first time in my 35 years on this planet, I felt the urge to go into space before I die.

Could a million dollar commercial run over and over and over with all the sporty features of the space ship or the promise of adventure unlike any other have hooked me? Never. I went from completely uninterested in ever going into space to desperately curious. In the span of two minutes.

It was a gentle luring of another’s perspective, the change it imparted in his life, being transferred onto me. And it stopped being about science entirely. And it was only about beauty, purpose, and yes, perhaps chasing the feeling of standing on a thousand mountain tops. 

Listen to the full audio here.

“It was like being able to span time of people’s lives.”

“It just stood out there sort of mystically and moved with a great deal of logic, and a great deal of purpose.”

“And when you look at this earth in all its beauty, and all its logic and all its purpose with all your understanding, you just have to say it’s too beautiful. There’s too much purpose to have happened by accident.”

Audio from Eugene Cernan cape cod interview 1981. Supplied by Richard Golden of George Washington University, the show’s producer.