A Word About Romantics

One more note from my interview with Story Musgrave (see previous post).
I have never really considered myself a romantic. Romantics, to my way of thinking, were fuzzy-headed dreamers who imagined Prince Charming would come rescue them, or that love conquered all. If I’d had to say, I would have said that I was a realist. Perhaps an optimistic realist. I don’t assume things are going to go well without attention, care and effort. I look for the potholes in a plan, even as I look to possibilities the horizon might contain. I hope for the best, plan for the worst, and keep my catcher’s mitt primed to field unexpected curve balls at all times.
It’s an approach I suspect a lot of adventurers and entrepreneurs share—at least, the ones with any degree or hope of success. And, indeed, Merriam Webster’s second definition of “romantic,” after “consisting of or resembling a romance,” is “having no basis in fact.” And its third definition is “impractical in conception or plan.”
But in talking with Story Musgrave—an incredibly accomplished pilot, astronaut, scientist, and medical surgeon known for his impressive analytical and detail-oriented thinking—I was surprised to hear him describe himself as an unabashed romantic.
“Really?” I asked. “You mean in terms of the poetry you’ve written?
“No,” he answered. “In terms of how I view the world.”
A romantic, he went on to say, is “a realist, but one who always puts the human in the equation. A romantic is just as strict a realist as an empiricist or scientist. However, you see the world through human eyes, and the human sensory system.”
That’s not to say that Musgrave is starry-eyed about either the world or its human inhabitants. He pointed to the 30 wars that are going on around the world, as we speak.
“Humans don’t wish to get along, and they don’t wish to collaborate,” he said with a resigned sigh. “They would rather fight. For some reason in their constitutions, their tribalism is much more important to them than cooperation. So you can ask the question, ‘Are they ever able to transcend their constitution and form a peaceful global community and look after the other creatures and Mother Earth? Are they ever going to be able to do that?’ And I would say, well, the history would say, they cannot. Because their basic constitution will not allow it. I think that’s the way it is.”
Perhaps Story’s outlook is closer to that of Romanticism, the artistic movement of the 19th century that focused on an appreciation of nature, “an interest in the remote,” and the harnessing of the imagination to envision or escape. But even that shoe doesn’t really seem to fit. Even Story’s explorations in nature and space had nothing to do with escape. They had to do with investigating, exploring, and collecting data, experience, and understanding of both the cosmos itself and how humans relate to all that vastness. But perhaps that’s his point.
“Throughout the millennia of being human, people looked to the sky for the answers about life here,” he said. “They didn’t look at Earth. They looked out there. They looked to the sky for the answers. They looked out there for their gods, and they looked out there for the answers. For the meaning and the hope of life here.”
Story could have looked at his explorations and work in space as simply collecting scientific data, just as many engineers look at what they design purely in terms of its technological capability, and many business managers look at the products they design strictly in terms of their potential for new profit. What makes Story a romantic, at least by his own definition, is that he never loses sight of either his own unique vantage point, as a human in the equation, or the impact or meaning of his work on other humans and their lives.
I couldn’t find Story Musgrave’s definition of a romantic anywhere in the dictionary. But I think I like it a lot. In fact, I think the world would be a far better place if all of us brought a bit more of Musgrave’s “romanticism” into our professional endeavors—always remembering to keep the human in the equation, while maintaining that delicate balance of realism and hope we need to endure and survive.