There but for Fortune

I have often been accused of being too literal, and so please understand that when I use the phrase “dumb luck” I have no intention of insulting anyone, but instead I use the phrase because, quite literally, luck itself cannot speak.  It has no message, no meaning.   It doesn’t know where it comes from and it doesn’t know where it’s going.   It’s a meandering ghost lurking behind every tree and under every stone and in every breath we take and even those we don’t.

Pilots like to believe that they are in control of their destiny.   It’s important that they believe that, because if they didn’t, they likely wouldn’t step foot in a cockpit and advance the throttle.   Flying is certainly more dangerous than staying at home and watching TV, and that is because there are more opportunities for something unlucky to happen.   “Fate is the Hunter” could not be a more apt title for aviation writer Earnest Gann’s autobiography, along with a 1964 film starring Glenn Ford and Suzanne Pleshette.   Shakespeare said it best when, no doubt while sitting on a pubstool, he said, “Shit happens.”   Good thing there was a bumper sticker writer around to write it down at the time.

I have found it fascinating over the years to listen to pilots discuss a recent deadly accident—any recent accident.   One might think they would be kinder to fellow pilots, but most often they are angry and critical of the pilot who died.   Even before knowing a detailed explanation, they blame the pilot for doing something stupid to cause their own demise.   “Pilot error” is in fact the cause of over 75% of fatal accidents according to the NTSB, but there’s a big percentage left over.   And that’s where the hunter comes in.

Dumb luck wields its unwitting existential sword in all directions.   It kills and it rescues.  Take, for example, my bout with stage IV cancer.  I don’t exactly feel lucky to have survived this far, now seven years after my cancer diagnosis.   Instead, I attribute my survival primarily to modern science and the physicians who have mastered their art at City of Hope.    I never had much hope, really, nor did I have much faith.    What I did have in copious amounts was resignation and compliance.   And in the end, I think it was entirely them, the physicians, who were to blame for you reading these words.   I am deeply grateful, even if you’re not.

But that too involved not a small measure of luck.   I had a protein, labeled simply P16, residing in my squamous cell carcinoma that was particularly responsive to the chemotherapy and radiation that killed, or at least postponed, the tumor’s metastasis.   That was lucky.    And I was lucky to have found that team of physicians who practiced their art form flawlessly, as well as a profoundly supportive family to monitor and shield me from contextual harm.

And yet, there are those whose bodies end up downstairs, in the basement morgue, refrigerated until claimed by their loving and supportive families.   Many of those had copious measures of hope and many of those even had sublime faith, but the mortality police came and snatched them anyway.  

The thing about dumb luck is that, by definition, it is out of our control.   We can hope and faith our way through the vicissitudes of this churlish life all we want, and the freaking plane might still crash, and the wayward car might run the light and smash us to smithereens.   These are hard realities, and not incidentally, it’s the anticipation of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune that is the definition of anxiety and the chief reason why pharmaceutical companies remain a good investment.

What remains out of our control can plague and preoccupy us, or we can choose the path of optimism, with the caveat that optimism when blind becomes ignorance, and ignorance causes a lack of the kind of healthy vigilance that keeps us relatively safe.   Going with the flow I sometimes think can be fun in a kayak, but it can also smash the kayak into a boulder and ruin our day.

Optimism, I suppose, is simply the idea that luck strikes disproportionately on the positive side of things, giving more than it takes.   The balance of probability, as Conan Doyle’s Holmes would say, certainly leans in that direction.   Plane crashes happen every day, but proportionately to miles flown, that’s still very little.   When they do, it’s usually the pilot’s fault, but usually isn’t always, and there’s still more than a smidgeon of fate involved.  So, to paraphrase the brilliant folk musician Phil Ochs paraphrasing everyone else, there but for dumb luck go you or I.

The Wrong Gauge

It should all be rather simple.   The heading indicator tells you which direction you are going, the altimeter tells you how high you’re flying, the airspeed indicator tells you how fast you are going.   But it isn’t so simple, because aviating isn’t just about reading our gauges; it’s about how we read them.

Many, many moons ago, I attended an “Evolution of Psychotherapy” conference, which those of us who have been in the head-shrinking field for a while will remember as the mecca for psychotherapists.   Roughly every decade, Jeff Zeig, a renowned Arizona psychologist, would bring together the living legends in the world of psychotherapy, until they died out one by one and it just got too depressing.  At one of those conferences, the brilliant psychoanalyst James Masterson was asked by a member of the audience why it was that no matter how confrontive she was with a particular patient, the patient remained unphased.   Masterson replied quite masterfully that the therapist was likely using “the wrong gauge” by judging her level of confrontation by how she would feel if someone said those things to her.   What mattered, of course, wasn’t her confrontation gauge, but the client’s.

It used to be thought, and likely still is, that people on the autism spectrum have difficulty understanding others’ perspectives, a lack of what the prolific psychologist David Premack originally called a “theory of mind”.  That observation has led to the view that people on the spectrum lack empathy, but it may well be that the problem instead could be caused by reading the wrong gauge.    It turns out, some new research indicates, that while it may be true that people diagnosed with autism often have difficulty understanding the perspectives of so-called “neurotypicals,” they don’t seem to have difficulty understanding each other.   In that sense, they only “lack empathy” when dealing with people who lack empathy for them.   We may, mistakenly, be looking only at the person with autism, and not the people with whom they are interacting.   That has led to a revision of the “empathy problem” such that some prefer to call it a “double empathy” problem.   The problem only occurs when two people lack empathy for each other.   Otherwise, the world turns just fine.

Reading the wrong gauge can have tragic consequences.  The crash that killed Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper (the day the music died) took place in snowy conditions in Northern Iowa.    21-year-old pilot Roger Peterson, in spite of his young age, was not inexperienced, but although he passed the written portion of the instrument exam, he failed the instrument checkride and wasn’t technically legal to fly on that snowy day.  No one could determine exactly why, just 5 miles from the airport, the airplane that Peterson was flying turned and crashed nose-down at high speed, but one theory that emerged is that the airplane he flew on that day had a new attitude indicator (or “artificial horizon”) installed, one that was different from the gauge in the airplane Peterson had been used to flying but that happened to be out of service that day.   In one gauge, the depiction of the airplane in the center moved in relation to the static horizon line, and in the other, the airplane symbol remained stationary while the background horizon moved.   The result is a “figure-ground” difference such that up is one direction on one gauge and down on the other.   Flying blindly in a snowstorm, Peterson could have thought he was climbing when in fact he was descending.   He may well have been flying the “wrong gauge.”  Had he not done this, Buddy Holly would likely have lived to know his son and Don McLean may never have been able to retire.

In primary flight training, we are taught not only how to read our gauges, but how they relate to one another and even the best ways to scan from one gauge to another.   In psychotherapy, we try to teach our clients how to read their own gauges, especially the one that tells us what to do with the other gauges.   When clients first appear, it’s not uncommon for them to perceive themselves living in a world in which they can’t tell up from down.

It should be simple– the airplane is climbing or descending, I’m getting too angry or too tired.   It’s making sure we are reading the right gauge at the right time in the right circumstance, and then knowing how to level out and stabilize ourselves; therein lies the challenge.

 

 

 

 

Soon, perhaps

I have not been flying; I have not been writing.   Neither endeavor creates revenue, at least not enough to pay for the occasional sushi dinner, and to some extent, because I am in COVID-business-rescue mode, I have been busying myself with revenue-generating activity.

Both endeavors—flying and writing that is, generate pleasure, or more accurately, satisfaction.

But as a few of you have noticed, I have not been terribly motivated to write this blog.    Only 3 (4 at the most) of my loyal and faithful readers have mentioned in any way that they missed me.   It hurts, but I’ll get over it.   I know where I stand, and the few people who might miss me should I disappear forever see enough of me already.

Through my own generativity, my own desperate sparks of desire and insecurity, I am fortunate to be sheltering in a rather beautiful, luscious place.   Avian life surrounds me, and despite the very sad demise of one of the largest oaks on my property succumbing now to the ravages of the Thomas fire, the vegetation surrounding me is lush.   I am writing this now on my back porch, the acrid air not yet stinging my eyes or constricting my lungs.

Human sounds, such as the one presently being made by the asshole who can’t imagine that the sound of his or her chainsaw at 9:20 in the morning rattles insomniacs such as I to the core, or more likely doesn’t give a damn, annoy me.   But I am not complaining.   Really.   I love my nest in Ojai.   Being fairly well-traveled, I can say with confidence that it is one of the most beautiful places in the world.   So when I can hear myself think over the sounds the humans are making, I am truly grateful to be here.

Soon I will get back up in the air.   That will be good, if not a bit nerve-wracking.   I will return to this blog as the mood dictates.  I am grateful to those of you who read it.   It is an odd thing; not unlike the radio disc jockey or the sports announcer who speaks to people he or she never sees.

Once, I sent a bunch of these posts to my literary agent—the one who helped me get my book on family feuds published, hoping that the concept of applying the aviation metaphor to a kind of self-help genre might be appealing.   She wrote back that I should forget about the psychological component and just write about flying.   I love reading about flying, so maybe she was right.   But I have spent a lifetime as a psychologist, trying to “repair the world” (as the West Coast Jews say) one life at a time, and I just can’t seem to rid myself of the temptation.  Today, however, there will be no self-help aviation metaphor.   You’re on your own.  Get over it.

So, as this bizarre, apocalyptic-insinuating world twists and turns around us, I will for now continue to metaphorically suck my thumb in this very sheltered existence, grateful to be alive, grateful that the person with the chainsaw seems to have accomplished the task at hand (or is pausing for hydration), that the big nasty black bee hovering around me hasn’t died from the polluted air, that George the feral cat still comes for her food in the morning, that I haven’t run out of coffee, and that I am alive to see another day unfold.   Soon, perhaps, I will get back up in the air.   Soon, perhaps.   (This post was written some time in the middle of the first wave of the pandemic– perhaps about a year ago now.   I had intended to post it but never got around to it.)

 

Earning It

I made a lot of mistakes during the checkride that was to finally determine whether or not I earned the privilege of carrying a blue pilot certificate around with me in my wallet.  I made so many of them that I was convinced I had failed.

I was shocked when after my last landing the examiner offered me an outstretched hand and said “congratulations.”  He told me to tie down the airplane and meet him inside while he did the necessary paperwork.  When I got inside, I told the examiner that I was certain I had failed.  He looked at me reassuringly and said, “You earned it.”

Given the number of things I had done wrong, and his criticism at several key junctures in the flight, I began to wonder exactly what I did right to earn the privilege.   Eventually I came to believe that I was rewarded with the certificate because I demonstrated something that I don’t think the examiner ordinarily saw.

There is an interesting rule that applies to the checkride.   Despite the fact that the pilot being scrutinized is still technically a student, the pilot is also legally considered the “pilot in command.”   What it means to be pilot in command is that the pilot, and only the pilot, is ultimately responsible for the outcome of the flight.   That responsibility, it seems, is not just about knowing the craft of flying so well that the airplane is truly subservient to its pilot; it is also about an attitude.

At the beginning of the checkride, the examiner suggested that we head out toward the coastline between Point Mugu and Santa Barbara to do the maneuvers that demonstrated that I was proficient in handling the aircraft.   I responded by saying, “No, let’s go to the Santa Paula aerobatic box.   The place you’re suggesting is a corridor for traffic up and down the coast.   It’s safer near Santa Paula.”

He looked surprised that so early in the flight I opposed him, but he also seemed pleased at the decision, and quickly relented.   He broke one of the few smiles I saw during the flight, and simply said, “Okay. “

Another moment of surprise came after the maneuvers, some of which did not go so well.   We were flying out of the box, just east of the small Santa Paula airport where I had taken most of my lessons, and he said, “Where do you want to do your landings?”  Just as we were approaching Santa Paula, he said “How about Santa Paula?”

I responded contrarily again, and said that I would rather do my landings in Oxnard, a relatively large, towered airport only a few miles away.  I thought, but didn’t say,  that I would rather have the comfort of a 6,000 foot long and 100 foot wide runway which would more likely hide my mistakes than the needle in a haystack runway in Santa Paula.   The examiner undoubtedly expected that I would choose the more familiar Santa Paula airport that we were just flying over, so he was surprised again.   But I was the pilot in command and that’s where I wanted to go.

The last surprise came as I entered the pattern at Oxnard.   The controller, who didn’t know I was a student, gave me an instruction I had never heard before and one I have rarely if ever heard since.   He told me to “make short approach” and abort the remainder of the downwind leg of the pattern and land immediately to make way for fast traffic coming into the airport behind me.  I quickly glanced over to the examiner, who began to nod his head to cue me to say what was indeed the first thing that came to my mind.   It was the single magic word that gets you out of jail free: “unable.”

Exhausted and convinced I had already failed, I keyed the mic and instead of the magic word I said another one: “wilco.”   “Wilco,” for those not familiar with the shorthand, is a portmanteau for “will comply.”   Out of the corner of my eye I could see the shocked, and even a bit frightened, expression on the examiner’s face.   I simultaneously kicked in left rudder, pushed the nose down, cut the power, and turned the yoke toward the big fat runway.   The gentle Cessna 150 floated swiftly and gracefully toward the center of the runway, where I made one of the best landings in my life.

I couldn’t help but once again see the surprised expression on the examiner’s face.   Although he had nothing but criticisms to say up to that point, he couldn’t help himself and he uttered, “That was a great landing.”

“Thanks,” I said diffidently, still convinced I had failed.

I did two more good landings after that, and it is possible that it was my landings that convinced the examiner to pass me.   But in retrospect, I don’t think so.   After several years of pondering what went right (what went wrong was obvious), I think that the key to my passing was my polite but clear refusals to do what he came to expect.

It takes both skill and judgment to fly safely, but in the contest between the two, judgment wins out.   In the case of my checkride, I didn’t merely accept what I thought was expected of me, but instead opted to make my own decisions.   I clearly did not demonstrate that I was the most skilled pilot, but I did show the examiner that I knew how to be pilot in command.   Hopefully, that’s why he thought I had earned it.

 

The Airport

There is little about an airport, a bus depot, or train station that I would think of as exhilarating.   These way stations, these points of departure and arrival are dreamy places, often fusty and threadbare, atavistic relics of the exhilaration of travel when travel was taking root among the new middle class in the U.S.   It seems, even, that by the time the new infrastructure is built, the remodeled terminal’s ribbon is cut and in a matter of just a few years, the features designed to freshen and impress become mere architectural assumptions.

Airports are dreamy places because, at least for me, I am nearly always tired by the time I get there, either from having to awaken at an awkward time or having arrived after sleeping fitfully at best en route.   They are also dreamy because, although one is about to go someplace or get someplace, we sit in waiting areas because, well, we are waiting.   Having now traveled for many years I rarely if ever plan a trip with a short connection.   The stress of the rush to the next flight, ferry, or bus is not worth whatever convenience it might afford on the other end. So more than ever, the harbor is a place of waiting, and often a matter of waiting alone.

Bus depots, these days, are often louche, home to drifters and grifters, a homeless home for the homeless, with bathrooms devoid of toilet paper, toilet stalls whose doors don’t align, graffiti scratched in the partitions, and urine smells that hang in the air.   One can be assured there will always be something out of order, whether that be a vending machine filled with expired candy bars or the entire women’s rest room, and if there’s an alley nearby you know that it would be best to avoid it, lest you inadvertently step on a used syringe.   The internet has now replaced most ticket offices, which remain for decorative, nostalgic effect, or more likely, because the remodeling budget didn’t include enough dough for demolition.

One can, I imagine, live their entire lives without ever encountering a classic American way station, but that would be difficult now in days when at least some travel is within the reach of all but the poorest of Americans.  It would be a shame, I think, but not everyone shares the sensations that I have when in an airport, or a port of any kind.   As a portmanteau, it is easy to forget that an airport is an airplane port, a port like any other, a harbor whose waters run deep with stories of shelter, departures and reunions.     The port shelters us from stormy seas, welcomes us, and nurtures us after and between long journeys.   They are windows through which we glimpse opportunity and adventure, or smell the subtle scent of home approaching. It is the diving board from which we escape the tedium of life and trade it in for a guaranteed adventure, or, on the other hand, it is the place that welcomes us to the relative calm of a storm left behind.

They are not always welcoming places.   Than Son Nhat airport in Saigon, for example, always seems as though I am walking into a steamy bee’s nest, perhaps an appropriate greeting, but still frazzling as hordes of humanity busily dash from one square meter to another and back again in what seems like a random pattern. I would prefer a softer greeting, but there is something refreshing about the slap in the face that this airport offers, just in case you had any delusions about serenity being in your short-term plans.

Yet, for each of these frantic airports, there are many more like Duluth, Minnesota, where there never seems to be more than a handful of people politely waiting to get through security, and the warmth of the indoor heating gives you a taste of the hearth and ingleside to come.

Whether frantic or placid, they all serve their purpose, and they all have those (now, sadly, mostly electronic) boards, inviting you to wonder and wander.   There it is—Rio de Janeiro, Tucson, Manchester, Prague.   Someone gets to take a ride among the clouds tonight.   Someone will get to walk down a gangway and into a vessel that will pierce the sky on its way over continents, oceans, cities and farms. Someone will get to leave this port and land at another.   Someone will make their dreams come true.

 

 

 

The Route Not Taken

I submitted an article for a column I write in Plane & Pilot magazine called “The Route Not Taken.”   I’m fond of the piece, probably because I just submitted it and haven’t had the requisite amount of time and distance to re-read it and hate it, and to question what I was thinking and what makes me think I have the chops to be writing articles in magazines anyway.

The idea of the piece is essentially that pilots are often reluctant to divert from their original destinations because certain elements of their personality that may be strengths also work against them.   Their dogged goal-directedness, for example, may contribute to a diminished psychological flexibility—perhaps the main ingredient required to make the important decision whether or not to divert from their original destinations or route.   Diversions, by the way, are an essential part of keeping pilots and their passengers safe from potentially hazardous weather, bumping into other airplanes, or being escorted by an F-16 or two and forced to land at a military base to be greeted by uniformed machine-gun toting patriotic Americans taught not to smile even when pointing a gun at an unarmed, gray-bearded and balding man exiting a wimpy airplane, perhaps alone or perhaps with a miniature poodle left in the cockpit because he couldn’t carry him out of the airplane at the same time that his hands were reaching for the sky.

In writing the article, I couldn’t help but think about a few diversions in my own life, although I decided not to mention them because of space limitations and because they weren’t specific to aviation.

It was the summer between the second and third year of college, and I saw an ad for a researcher position at Learning Magazine in Palo Alto.   The researcher was the one who read articles and wrote summaries for the staff writers, and it was a step above the mailroom on the path to becoming a writer.   I interviewed well, but didn’t get the job. When I told my housemate, who knew how badly I wanted the job and also happened to be a fearless, only child, he asked my permission to call the editor himself and find out why I didn’t get hired.   I reluctantly gave in, and sure enough Jason was able to coax the editor to reveal “off the record” that although I was the most qualified and possibly most talented of the three finalists, I was the wrong gender.   The magazine staff was almost entirely male, and they were being pressured from management to even things out.   Jason was angry, but being rather feminist even in those days, I wasn’t, and even felt somewhat satisfied that I had lost the job for a good cause.

But I have often thought that, had I been able to score a paycheck for writing, which was my first love, I would never have gone on to become a psychologist.   It is not that I entirely regret having spent most of my life in a career that has allowed me the privilege of contributing to the relief of suffering one human at a time; my career has been a blessing on multiple levels. Yet I do sometimes regret that my practical fear of not earning enough money to support myself and a potential family —a fear to some extent that was nurtured by my parents’ dogged determination to shrug off their own poverty—prevented me from following my deeper passion.

I also know had I gotten that job at Learning Magazine I have no idea how my life would have turned out.   The entire game would have been altered. Every subsequent moment would have been different, never to intersect with the life I actually ended up having. The expenditure of any significant amount of energy on regrets over paths not taken is one of the least productive ways of engaging the past, unless of course we use it as motivation to act in a more courageous way in the moment.

There are, of course, many reasons pilots end up making decisions to forge ahead when doing so may not be the safest thing to do, and each pilot in each circumstance will be motivated differently.   While the article in Plane & Pilot began as an article about diversions, it turned into an article about psychological flexibility– a key factor that correlates highly with overall measures of mental health.   There is considerable evidence that enhancing one’s own ability to be less rigid is a skill that can be learned. It requires the motivation and determination to do so, but people who already find themselves too rigid to adjust their plans and thinking to the demands of the moment often don’t lack the determination to see things through. It just requires the decision to channel that determination into being more flexible, or, as Yogi Berra was alleged to have said: When you come to a fork in the road, take it!

 

 

 

 

The Chair in the Living Room

There’s a simple, upholstered chair in my living room.   It seems to fit me perfectly, just small enough for my feet to reach the ground, and sometimes I imagine it waiting for me as I shuffle out of bed in the morning.   I sat in that chair daily for long hours and weeks connected to a box slung over my arm that spit toxic chemicals into my jugular vein, ticking off the doses intended to destroy the cells in my body that just wanted to do nothing more than grow with reckless abandon.   Now that chair is where I like to write in the morning, before I am awake enough to censor my thoughts, or conscious enough to feel the pull of the dreaded details that strip me of the delicious languor of sleep.

It takes multiple cups of coffee to break up my nagging morning indolence, until the peripatetic ghost hiding in what’s left of my bone marrow finds my musculature and takes it over.  I don’t know how or why I feel driven to roam gypsy-like from one landscape to another, but I imagine that it began when I discovered the advertisements in the New York Times Travel Section that came to our apartment door promising free brochures in exchange for sending in the coupon.   I was a lonely kid, and desperately wanted to receive mail, and those big manila packages were delightful and made me feel important.   I do think those brochures were my introduction to the world outside the distance between my apartment and James J. Reynolds Jr. High School.

I hid them, for some reason, as though they were pornography, in the box inserted in the wall where you could put an air conditioner if you were wealthy enough to afford one. I had to unscrew the four corners of the metal cover in order to open and access the contraband.   In those troubled, pimply and pathetic years of adolescence, travel brochures were my refuge.  How I loved receiving mail, even if the sender had no idea or cared not a whit about who I was!   The Canadian Travel Bureau, if that was what it was called, did it the best, by the way.

I don’t know if it was the lush photographs in those brochures and the poetic marketing verbiage that fueled my imagination of distant places, or if they merely decorated what was already just a simple wish to escape the drama of my family. I was ill-equipped to handle that drama, so I drove a nail into the doorframe, bent it over the door to keep out intruders, unscrewed the cover to the air conditioner box in the wall, pulled out the travel folders, and escaped into the Norwegian fjords, quaint Old Montreal, and Yellowstone geysers of my mind.

So it was that a love of the places out there and the feelings that they generate grew in me.   It extended into high school, when I managed to get my driving permit at 15½.– the earliest age allowed.   I got a job washing dishes at Denny’s just to earn enough money to buy a car ($500. did it) and earn the money for gas so that I could drive it until exactly the amount with which I started was left in the tank, turn around and drive it back home.   At that point in my life, there was no greater feeling on earth than the cold wind blowing through the open window with the heater on full blast warming my body from the legs up as I twisted up the Pacific Coast Highway at night with the moonlit Pacific on the left and the hillside on the right and the radio blaring Janis Ian singing “At Seventeen” just to me.

Then, after college, and multiple trips across the USA, I bought a Eurailpass (I think for $200.) which gave me unlimited access to the European rail system for an entire month.   It was 1975, the year made special when, in a dormitory lobby in Innsbruck, I met the woman who 7 years later was to become my wife.   I stalked her (with her informed consent) for 3 days while we traveled on trains singing and gently arguing about whether Sinatra’s version was better than Ella’s.

When my kids were grown, I finally got the opportunity to take to the skies as I had always wanted.   Launching off the earth and guiding a ship through the skies is a thrill unlike any other.   But it is always about movement, about condensing time so that somehow, magically, it is possible to be one place and then another, very different place, where people dressed, spoke, walked and even gesticulated differently, architects designed buildings differently, and surviving the weather presented different challenges.

Then, there is the thrill that has taken me half a century to appreciate, the singular experience of coming home to the relative safety of the nest, where that upholstered chair is waiting for me in the living room.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Not Flying

Although it’s only flown once in the last year, my airplane is still required to undergo its (expensive) annual checkup, because in this country of fractured health care and inconsistent legislative imperatives, we are required to take better care of our airplanes than we are of ourselves.

While it is receiving its annual checkup, it is taken apart and I cannot fly it.   But I miss her, so after writing this, and going shopping for dinner tonight, I will be heading to my hangar to pay her a short visit. I know it can get cold and lonely in that hangar, especially with the cowling off.

It is said that absence makes the heart grow fonder, which is a platitude that has always rung true for me, at least until enough time passes that the walls of the heart thicken and whatever fondness may have resided there calcifies just enough to cause the heart to stop beating and kill us.   That is why falling in love with anything or anyone is one of the worst ideas God has implanted in the human psyche, yet many of us weaklings do it anyway, over and over again, until we drop dead from grief and longing.

This is a problem with flying. If you love it, and can’t do it, it becomes oddly reminiscent of that feeling you had when you fell in love with the girl in fourth grade who didn’t know– and probably would never know until 45 years later when you’re married and connect for the first time on Facebook, that you even existed.

Not flying, as is true with unrequited love, presents the practical problem of what to do and how to handle oneself until the desperation ends and the steed once again becomes mountable.   Many of us pass much of our time in this purgatory, and face the continual task of combatting the angst that sometimes accompanies languor.   The challenge, it seems, is to somehow get comfortable with the emptiness, how to find value not only in what we do, but what we don’t do.

This, I have discovered, can be learned.   I am a person who, when seeing an empty shelf in a bookcase feels compelled to find enough books to fill it up, or, when seeing a bare wall in my house, feels compelled to find a piece of art to make it interesting.   These things and others like them is a kind of sickness, I think, a form of avoidance of the essential, the abstract, the quiet and pedestrian.

One of my earliest failed attempts at fiction was a story about a man staring at a bare plaster wall, noticing all the cracks in the wall, and wandering through the cracks as though it were a map leading him somewhere.   The story, which sounds better as I describe it than what it was, was an unintended metaphor, I suppose, for how one can get lost in the mist of finding something in nothing, which, I suppose as well, is another metaphor for this life itself.

Ultimately, everything we either choose or are forced not to do presents us with an opportunity to do, learn, or be something else, and that reduces down to an attitude shift.   Albert Ellis, one of the two major originators of cognitive-behavioral therapy, dubbed a certain kind of thinking musturbating, in which we get fixed on what we believe we must be doing, thinking, or feeling.   Sometimes we think inside little boxes of our own creation, just like some of us manage to dress in the same drab style every day, not because it is what we particularly want to do, but simply because we feel skittish about stepping outside of our own boxes.

The voyeur in me loves to watch what people do when they are waiting to do something else.   Pilots in pilot lounges are often diligently sitting at a computer screen checking the weather and planning their next flight, catching some z’s, watching a big-screen TV, or reading a newspaper.   For some reason, I don’t see too many of them reading books, but that’s fodder for another post. At airports, as is true throughout the world, these days people are increasingly spending their precious time staring at their smart phone screens, probably, I assume, watching documentaries or studying the latest thoracic surgery research. I won’t tell you how I feel about “screen time,” although you can probably guess pretty well by now, but isn’t it sweetly hypocritical of me in that most likely you are reading this right now on some screen somewhere, and not in some tangible book, the pages of which you can feel and smell and put on a shelf and never have to worry about its batteries dying on you mid-sentence.

So I won’t be flying today, which, unto itself, is one of the several sad facts I am likely to encounter before the day is over. I do hate supermarkets, and I will be in and out in as short a time as possible. My challenge is how to make those empty spaces precious, how to find the maps to far-off places in the cracks in the otherwise bare walls, and I am confident that although I can musturbate at times with best of them, I am going to succeed.

 

 

 

The Flight of the Enchilada

enchiladaI don’t eat Mexican food too often, but when I do, I usually go for the chile relleno. There’s something wonderful about the balance between the spiciness of the chile and the softening effect of the cheese.   And even though most Mexican restaurants serve generous portions of everything, if the relleno came with only half a chile, I would likely be annoyed.   Like an enchilada, there is something unsettling about half a chile, half a dictionary, half a blog post, half an airplane, or half a flight to anywhere.

One can leave most things half-completed, but flying is something that essentially requires the whole enchilada. You can’t really stop flying mid-air between San Francisco and Houston, although you could always land and call it quits, and spend the night in a roach-infested motel in Gallup, New Mexico.   But in order to be a whole enchilada, or a whole anything, you are going to need more than the sum of its parts.

In order to get off the ground, you need just the right ingredients mixed in just the right proportions. Lift alone won’t get you anywhere, thrust won’t necessarily get you in the air, and drag—needed to keep you from going out of control, is actually designed to get you nowhere, which is why drag is a drag.   You need the whole enchilada, ingredients mixed just right, to achieve the alchemy of controlled flight.

I had a professor in college, whose name for reasons I would prefer not to mention, I don’t recall. (I give in– he slept with my ex-girlfriend, and even though she was an ex, it still bothered me.) He was fond of saying, half-jokingly I hope, that when he died he wanted the definition of “gestalt” written on his tombstone.   It was a silly thing to say, but as a mnemonic device it worked well because I remember the phrase now, more than 40 years later.   A gestalt, Dr. Whatshisname said, was the “ongoing, contingent, sociobiological organization of attention and action.”

We experience life in chunks—in organizations of attention and action, and each chunk is not only ongoing, but it is also contingent on what comes before and after it. The “before” part is obvious, but the “after” part was something illuminated by behaviorists such as B.F. Skinner, who insisted that what we do is often determined by what immediately follows it.

Contingency is important, because it is how things are connected, how we are all interdependent, and why if a tree falls in the forest we may not hear it but it will still scatter the ants beneath it.

As long as you keep cutting the enchilada in half, and realize that you still have an enchilada, then each half becomes a whole unto itself, especially if you keep eating it. You’ve just created smaller enchiladas. That is why in order for something to really be whole, it needs to be something greater than the sum of its parts. If, on the other hand, you were able to break down the enchilada the way I remember breaking down water in chemistry class into hydrogen and oxygen, interesting things begin to happen.

Enchiladas require tortillas, which require flour or masa, and water. To make the cheese you will probably need some milk, rennet, and maybe a starter culture. You might even add some salt to be adventurous.   Then there’s the chile pepper, and maybe a little guacamole.   None of those things on their own look or taste anything like an enchilada. But, mixed together in the right proportions and under the right Mexican sun, something greater than the mere sum of its parts begins to emerge.

It is, of course, alchemy when we mix ingredients to create something transformative.   It is alchemy when we mix lime with sand and water to create concrete, which by some magic of physics or chemistry becomes the building I am writing this in, and alchemy when you add rice to salmon roe and quail eggs to create the transcendent mixture of earth, sea and sky we call sushi.   It is alchemy when we fall in love, and even greater alchemy when we remain in love. It is alchemy when we fly an airplane. It is alchemy that is the foundation and the very substance of the feeling of awe, which so many have equated with a sense of holiness, numen, or spirituality.

Flying, as is true with everything we do, is a gestalt—a contingent organization of attention and action.   To be up high, beyond the realm even of happy little bluebirds, is an alchemical miracle.   As is true for love, good food, and those things that we value most, it is the transformation of disparate elements under the right conditions—a series of intentional acts that taken together exceed the mere sum of its parts.   It is, dare I say, the whole enchilada.

 

 

 

 

 

A Friend in Low Places

My angels, when they decide to show up for work, are my friends in high places.   But I, along with all pilots, have a friend in low places too. She goes by the rather awkward name of Ground Effect.     It is one of the least poetic of aviation monikers (she once whispered to me that she would prefer the sexy, French name “Pitot Heat”), but when she shows up she can indeed be quite poetic.

Aeronautical textbooks tell me that this angel is the “increased lift and decreased aerodynamic drag that an aircraft’s wings generate when they are close to a fixed surface.”   That surface is typically the ground, and so a simpler definition of ground effect is an airplane’s increased performance as it launches skyward and touches down.

As you touch down, ground effect feels like a friend, a soft cushion, or a nurse with sweet, knowing eyes as you wake up from a coma in a foreign hospital. And as you depart skyward, ground effect temporarily adds a little oomph to the launch, a gentle assist, a glance and a wink from the girl on the barstool that you imagine might actually happen someday.

Those of us who have lived long enough to tell stories have undoubtedly encountered such effects in our lives. It may appear to be the guardian angel who intervenes when the doctor calls and says that the test results were negative, or the mother who picks you up and comforts you when you come home in tears after being hit between the eyes by a snowball that turned into ice as it rapidly reached its target.

Having a purposeful life—a life of service to others, functions similarly to ground effect as well, as a balm for bitterness and regret.   Having a life filled with service to others not only cushions others’ hard landings, but eases our own burdens as well. Emerson said, “The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.”

Ground effect can fool you, though, into believing you are flying better than you are, and has undoubtedly contributed to some pilots meeting their maker just as they meet that hill in front of them that they initially thought they could climb over. That is because on takeoff, the effect of improving your ability to fly will get you off the ground quicker than if ground effect didn’t exist, and as you climb and exit ground effect, you experience a reduction in flying ability and the airplane will lose some lift and sink.   While pilots are trained to “fly out of ground effect” and adjust as they make their way through this transition, especially when combined with a hot, humid or high altitude situation, they fail to consider just how difficult it can be to climb once the extra support of ground effect leaves you and the airplane behind.

Sometimes, expecting that ground effect will ease your transition from air to earth, it will seem as if it is doing its job too well, and delaying your appointment with the runway.   If you find yourself running out of runway before the airplane touches down, ground effect may seem like that good friend that Oscar Wilde reminds us stabs us in the front.   It becomes the friend who tells us straight up that our zippers are down, or that you left that long sticker on the back of your pants that lets everyone know how big your waist is.

Physics will have a good explanation for those occasions when ground effect seems to work too well for its own good, or when it seems absent entirely and I land with an unwelcome thud.   I have always landed hard on myself when my airplane lands hard on the runway, but perhaps it isn’t really my fault.   Although I may have had a good flight, my angelic friends in high places keeping me safe as I leave the ground, cruise, and begin my descent, maybe that thud as I land hard is just my friend in low places failing to show up when I need her.   Angels, I guess, occasionally need some time off.