Take advantage of your opportunities

As the saying goes, opportunities are what we make of them.
I’ve recently indulged my inner geek. I’m something of a NASA junkie. When I saw that the space shuttle was going to be ferried over Hempstead on its way back to Florida after landing in California, I tracked it online and at the right moment went outside and snapped some pictures of it.
Later in the week I learned that former astronaut Charles Bolden would be speaking in Prairie View. He has been nominated as the next director of NASA. I took full advantage of my position to go and see him. The next day I had a telephone interview with Alan Bean, the fourth man to walk on the moon (that story will come out later).Each of those are opportunities that I made for myself. I don’t normally cover a NASA beat in Waller County. I learned a long time ago that a perk to this journalism gig is meeting celebrities and other people who think they’re important, such as politicians and athletes.
I have yet to meet a president, but I’ve met many a governor, senator, congressman, mayor, legislator and the like.
Politicians, in general, are an eccentric lot tinted with a healthy dose of ego. Athletes, on the other hand, are an egotistical lot with a healthy dose of eccentricity. The same goes for musicians and actors. They all want your collective attention but don’t generally care for it one-on-one.
Astronauts are a breed apart. Every one I have met – and there have been many – have all been outstanding individuals. They have a way of making you feel you are the most important person in the world to them at that moment. Many – and Buzz Aldrin in particular – have gone out of their way to accommodate me and my interview requests.
I’ve interviewed many actors, most of them sci-fi and western stars, and find that they either really love the attention or else they hate being bothered. There is not much middle ground.
I really admire the job NASA does in its astronaut selection and training process. It routinely produces top-notch individuals. To be sure, becoming a space traveler isn’t something that happens by chance. These are all people who have made the most of their opportunities.
Opportunity is a common theme at graduations as well. Graduates learn that life is what they make it to be. It’s a question of what opportunities they make for themselves and which ones that come their way that they take advantage of.
Sometimes we who are far removed from our cap-and-gown days seem to forget about the world of endless opportunities that still sit in front of us while we blindly hold to what has been.
Frequently in my career as I have tracked down celebrities and written their stories, I have had colleagues ask me why I do it. Why do I make extra work for myself when said celebrity isn’t part of my normal beat?
It’s simple. I do it because I can. I do it because I want to and no one has told me I can’t. It’s the same thing that got me into forming the Lone Ranger Fan Club. Not only is no one else doing it, but I’m now looked upon (errantly so) as one of the premier experts on the Masked Man. I’ve given numerous newspaper and radio interviews all because I did something that I simply wanted to do.
Of course, not all of our opportunities are success stories. A few years ago I started a home-based business that took off like wildfire. And just as quickly as it started, it died. Rather than making me independently wealthy, I wound up bankrupt. Believe me, it’s hard to see opportunities when you’ve just lost your job, home and many of your possessions.
I’ve known my share of hard times and now I’m experiencing some good times. I’ve gotten to this point through faith and the opportunities that has provided. As the saying goes, when God closes a door, he opens a window.
The world calls those “windows of opportunity.” I can see now that a world of opportunity is open before me, even if the economy is bad. How I – or anyone, really – takes advantage of those opportunities will determine how we do in life. I owe this little reminder to my curiosity of looking up in the sky and seeing the shuttle fly by. What a wonderful thing that is.