I am writing this particular post in a café in Trieste, Italy, not too far from where Rilke wrote the beginning of his “Duino Elegies.”   So it is fitting that I defer to Rilke’s poem from his “Love Poems to God.”   I am not sure this is the best translation, but here it is:

How surely gravity’s law,
strong as an ocean current,
takes hold of even the strongest thing
and pulls it toward the heart of the world.

Each thing-
each stone, blossom, child –
is held in place.

Only we, in our arrogance,
push out beyond what we belong to
for some empty freedom.

If we surrendered
to earth’s intelligence
we could rise up rooted, like trees.

Instead we entangle ourselves
in knots of our own making
and struggle, lonely and confused.

So, like children, we begin again
to learn from the things,
because they are in God’s heart;
they have never left him.

This is what the things teach us:
to fall,
patiently trusting our heaviness.
Even a bird has to do that
before he can fly.

I am convinced that the trick to becoming an expert at landing an airplane– or anything for that matter, is to approach each landing as if it were the first.   You bring everything your body knows to whatever first you are engaging in.

In Rilke’s poem, we learn to land better by first surrendering to “earth’s intelligence,” and then beginning again (and again), as a child.     We learn to land not by entangling ourselves in knots of our own making (over-thinking), but by instead maintaining what the Buddhists call a “beginner’s mind.”

I used to play tennis a bit in high school, and I find that whenever I am away from the game for a decade or so, my first time back I tend to play exceptionally well (for me).   The same is true for flying.   If I am away for a while and then return my first flight looks like I’m a pro.   It is the next 20 flights that look bad, because I am thinking rather than trusting what I already know.

There is an old story about how the philtrum—that little fold beneath your nose, comes about.   When we are conceived, the story goes, God gives us all the knowledge in the universe, but when we are born God touches us just below the nose and we forget everything.

In the course of mastering any skill, our task isn’t necessarily how to learn that which we don’t know, but instead, with the mind of a beginner, surrender to what is already known.

Here is Rilke again:

If the angel deigns to come it will be because you have convinced her, not by tears but by your humble resolve to be always beginning; to be a beginner.