Her life’s trajectory showed our destiny isn’t written for us

She was an unsung hero of America’s space race until she was 97 — for almost her entire life.
But she was never an unlikely hero despite the circumstances of her life from birth to death.
Few might ever expect an African American child born in the southern West Virginia of 1918 to one day calculate the seemingly incalculable milestones of NASA.
But Katherine Johnson and her co-workers, who worked in a racially segregated workplace until the late 1950s, would go on to provide some of the greatest contributions to making America great more than 60 years ago.
Johnson died Monday morning. She was 101. She retired from NASA in the mid-1980s after a storied career spanning Project Mercury to the Apollo moon landings and space shuttle missions.
In the days when computers were mostly based on vacuum tubes and only became transistorized in the 1960s, Johnson and her colleagues would plot rocket trajectories by hand.
Referred to as one of the “computers” then who did the equations on paper in a once actual computer-skeptical world, she was the astronauts’ gold standard.
We marvel at people who could do such advanced math then and even today. Not just those who may be minorities, or women, or immigrants or come from modest circumstances or face bigotry down, either.
Yet, those among us who often are judged by what they look like, where they come from, how much money they have, where their degree is from or if they have one, but still rise above it all and to do great things, we take special pride in.
In a 2009 speech, President Obama perhaps said it best when he told students at an Arlington, Va., high school: “No one’s written your destiny for you. Here in America, you write your own destiny. You make your own future.”
There are countless examples of people that have made each of those words ring true and glow like the rockets Johnson once helped send into orbit and beyond.
Perhaps the most important lesson we can all take away from this extraordinary woman is at the end of the day it’s up to each of us to make our own future — it’s our own responsibility. Something that often seems to be lacking today, where too many are more interested in blaming someone or something for their own problems rather than themselves.
Undoubtedly, Johnson and many others — especially minorities and women — have been treated unfairly in the past and even today, often having to work doubly hard to succeed or just fit in.
Of course, those kinds of circumstances are unacceptable. Yet, such stories go to show not just how great the human spirit is, but remind us there’s no excuse for not trying.
Perhaps she may never be a household name, but Johnson captured why she should be with this parting wisdom.
“I don’t have a feeling of inferiority. Never had. I’m as good as anybody, but no better.”