No Laughing Matter

The meltdown of Lisa Nowak, the astronaut who went on a 900-mile trek by car from Houston to Orlando to confront the woman she thinks is in the way of a relationship she wants to develop with a fellow astronaut, has been good for laughs on the late-night television shows. I confess: I chuckled at a few Jay Leno jokes on the Tonight Show.

But the reality is that this is really a sad story -- and one from which I hope more of us will learn. Nowak, like her confreres in NASA, is driven, intense, competitive, super intelligent and, to the world that sees only that side of her, she has a near-perfect life. But she knows differently. She is as emotionally fragile as any of us.

And, like many of us, she hasn't managed to reach out for help in addressing that fragility before doing something so extreme and uncharacteristic. It's easier to laugh at her than to admit that we could BE her.

Reach out for someone's hand.