Lessons learned

We ponder what we want to leave behind.

Our navigator is just back from a class reunion, one of those experiences that is strongly bittersweet.  It was sweet to be with people with whom he’d gone through long and difficult times.  It was bitter remembering those who had been lost, and what had not been accomplished that seemed so possible back then in the beginning of the world.  Well, we’re all dinosaurs now; our navigator won’t be going to sea again, our astronomer won’t be leading a world-class team of scientists toward a Nobel, our photographer won’t be landing a Guggenheim Fellowship to further his film photography.  We are all thinking, in one way or another, of what to pass on to younger generations.  And how to do it.

It’s not that we claim a level of skill or intelligence above later generations.  Our tutor, at least, knows what’s coming up the pipeline, and he’s not despairing.  It’s rather that, among us, we have a wealth of experience and lessons learned the hard way.  We’ve gained some wisdom and demonstrated a lot of foolishness.  It’s just inefficient for all that to be reworked again, at a loss in time and pain that maybe might be avoided.

We’re not talking about the superb skills we honed in the analog days.  Our navigator could shoot three bearings and a radar range and plot the resulting fix in two minutes, using paper charts, pencils and compasses; that’s all done electronically now, and better so.  Passing information by voice radio was inefficient and took time that we no longer have (and didn’t have back in the day, sometimes).  Recalibrating an analog meter was just tedious.  And we certainly don’t need to go into the details, the knobology, of various things we worked with.

But when we think about what to pass on, we run into one major problem: predicting the future. What of our experiences will be useful in two, or three, or four decades?  What was the product of a transient set of circumstances, and what might be applied to what’s actually going to happen?  Our astronomer notes that, some years ago, he asked a number of senior figures in the field what they would recommend to new graduate students to work on.  In other words, he asked them for short-range predictions of the direction that the science might take.  All refused to commit themselves to anything at all.  Predictions are hard, and go wrong often.  One of our navigator’s classmates writes Science Fiction, which is nominally about predicting the future, but we’ve noted that forecasting accuracy is not an important part of the genre.

Mostly, we’ve concluded that relationships among people provide the most useful and lasting of lessons.  Details of equipment, techniques, organizations and so forth change; how the second mate and the third get along remains vital.  Of course there are generational shifts, but we think the spread in character among people within a generation will turn out to be more important.

There is one thing we haven’t worked out: how can we get the youngsters to listen?