Frontiers

New, Undiscovered, Change, Different, Unknown......These five words will all at one time or another be part of our lives.  It doesn't matter how prepared you are for the future, the future will change and eventually you will be asked to do something "blindly".  I consider such acts, acts of faith.  Why is it that we are so afraid of the unknown?  Are we all so pessimistic to believe that an unknown or unplanned future automatically means and unhappy or unsuccessful future?

Working in a scientific laboratory has helped me to become comfortable with the unknown.  Many times I wonder if I've done a procedure right or if the results looked good.  How do you measure the success of something done for the first time?  Many times we are happy to see anything just because it means the procedure has potential to work.  Other times we actually have an idea of what we should see.  I have learned to be patient because many times I had the correct results, but I couldn't see them yet.  Its so entertaining to run experiments with steps that span more than one day because one day I can be completely convinced of a failure only to return the next day to find that the laboratory fairy placed results over night.

Even in the lab there are some principles that apply to life in general:

1. A perfect standard helps us to see where we are and where we could be.
2. Many washings are necessary to prepare for the ideal state
3. If marked correctly we can be noticed amongst the millions
4. If you don't see anything its because you still need to wait or something else needs to happen, something is there....trust me
5. The slightest deviations from protocol can have an adverse effect on the desired outcome
6. You can't always do things exactly how you want to, unexpected things happen, many times there is nothing you can do about it.  Just move on and figure a way around it.
7.  If the results are not what you expected that is not necesarily a bad thing, many of the best discoveries are complete accidents.