52 Weeks, 52 Words: Week 51 - Wonder

This week just at bedtime (or what I try to call bedtime as my kids feign being sleepy and use every trick in the book to avoid going to sleep) our collective eyes looked to the skies as a spectacle that hasn’t happened in centuries was before us: a brilliant starlight shone without wobbling and transfixed our imaginations. This week – days before we celebrate Christmas – The Great Conjunction brought Jupiter and Saturn into alignment with Earth in a rare spectacle of celestial amazement.

From an astronomy perspective, The Great Conjunction is the result of Jupiter and Saturn have coming closer than at any time in the last 400 years as the orbital paths of the two huge planets lined up with Earth and the Sun.

This happens every 20 years but many times the conjunctions are impossible to see with the naked eye because they happen during daylight hours.

With Jupiter orbiting the sun every 12 Earth-years and Saturn making a full rotation every 29.5 Earth-years, it won’t be until 2080 that this phenomenon occurs again at nighttime and these heavenly bodies so closely align with our planet.

Excusing for a moment that with an untrained eye or rudimentary equipment for celestial observation, or for the fact that conditions here in New Jersey were mostly cloudy, the anticipation and the excitement for the experience were more remarkable than the sight of this occurrence. By the time I had pried myself away from the kid’s bedrooms, too, the optimal observation opportunity had passed.

However, the build-up to the opportunity to witness this and the actual viewing of the bright object in the night sky are, in fact, two truly different sides of the same coin and a cautionary tale for appropriate consideration to our medical communications worlds.

They are a reminder that it is, in fact, a matter of the journey and the destination. However, also a reminder that our attitude during the journey influences the luster of the final destination.

On occasion, the factors we seek out line themselves up perfectly for something amazing to happen. We have a breathtaking and exquisite moment to connect an insight to a strategy, a strategy to a tactic, our past experiences with a new product, a KOL to an influencer...any number of things.

Or we don’t.

As is more often the case we have to grind out our existence and toil through banal references, attempting to squeeze blood from a stone or thread the needle with an obstinate MLR reviewer, indiscriminate strategic imperatives and prosaic iterations of a brand plan, or repetition of tactics and dialed-back budgets for unimaginative project plans. And within this sea of sameness we are challenged to find something unique or, at the very least meaningful.

I would argue that by placing ourselves so squarely in that kind of a polarity and bifurcating the day-to-day reality of our agency life into amazement and dullness we end up doing ourselves, our agencies, our clients and our client’s clients (the patient) a disservice. I am prone to it and guilty of it all the time.

And from time to time I have to cajole myself into remembering that all does not have to be perfect for success to be found. Nor does all have to look bleak when I am tired and feeling as though I am trudging through a bog.

We may despair at the prospect of finding ourselves gazing upward on a different set of mostly cloudy conditions at an agency or client level and we can bemoan the lack of sophisticated tools and technologies that are available to our cause, but that attitude and mindset wouldn’t likely change our outcomes even if the context were altered.

Who among us can perpetuate wonder and instill delight and amazement in colleagues and clients despite those circumstances? Who can gaze toward a universe of possibilities and engineer wonder and awe even in a dearth of tangible options? While that may sound difficult (and it certainly is) the incredulity of the feat and the foreboding we must overcome is not far from our grasp.

We have to push ourselves and our teams toward the wonder in it all – and the wonder in the journey irrespective of the final destination. If we can (re)kindle that sort of amazement – even with the most irritable and jaded among our ranks – the results will be spectacular.

Each time we get wrapped up in the toil and tediousness of the process we owe it to everyone to pause and remember the splendor of others experience is directly correlated to our own.

The simple truth is that the brilliance of Saturn and Jupiter’s paths converging is, for us here gazing from Earth, nothing more than a reflection of sunlight bouncing back and gleaming in the night sky.

So too will our associates reflect our wonder when we bring that gift to our medical communications efforts day in and day out. What a luminous sky that will be…it’s no wonder our ancestors were so captivated by the mysteries of the bedazzled skies at nighttime.

There’s a part of me that believes it is simply in our DNA and from generations and epochs prior we are meant to look heavenwards and dream. Our fate is written in the stars and there is true joy and wonder that can be reclaimed looking outwardly, but more importantly, by looking inwardly.

I know I have been mesmerized by space and space exploration since I was a little boy. And without intending to with any deliberate purpose I’ve seen that same curiosity and awe spread across my daughter’s face. She is an astronomer of the highest order – not because she sees the cosmos but because she wants to see it.

We did never end up seeing The Great Conjunction directly. But we spent time in astonishment of the pictures shared online by others who had and reveled in the fantastical. She simply didn’t know any better and hadn’t had the accumulation of disappointment to cast a shadow on the moment.

Her wonder became my wonder, and we shared that moment of splendor for exactly what it was and didn’t hasten a thought for what it was not.

We simply dreamed…

My charge to you, then, is this: shine brightly and let that light reflect in your daily efforts.

Your wonder will spark science to meet strategy and drive purpose with passion.

And when you do and it does, that may make for The Greatest Conjunction of all.

?