Operating rooms are the ultimate paradox. At the center is this wet bag of humanness. Manifested by my just having sneezed, humans are leaky, impossibly complex, sloppily put together, and hard to predict. Add to this, the reason we end up on operating tables is that we are malfunctioning in some important way. The malfunction can raise the level of uncertainty by a little or by multiple powers of ten.

There are times we don’t know what we’re looking for when we engage one another. We want the other’s thoughts. We want them to brainstorm, associate, cluster, explore, dump out the contents of their brains into view so we can sift and see if there’s anything there useful or interesting. This kind of thinking is what gets generated from open-ended questions.

Today's post is a brief review of Astronaut Cady Coleman's book, Sharing Space.

One might think referring to someone as an astronaut would be both the ultimate and definitive thing one could say. However, with Astronaut, Air Force Lt. Colonel, MIT graduate, Chemistry Ph.D., Flute accompanist for Jethro Tull, fluent in Norwegian and Russian, parent, and now author, it's hard for me to escape the feeling, "Cady, leave something for the rest of us to do."