I was a student pilot when I first heard a controller tell another pilot who was approaching the airport that they were “cleared for the option.”   I had no idea what that meant, and was too embarrassed to ask my instructor.   I just assumed it meant that a pilot could choose to do either a “taxi-back” or a “touch and go” landing, because those were the only two landings I had been doing up to that point.  

But I had never looked it up until now, and it turns out that it means, in official FAA language, “do whatever the hell you want.”   That could be anything from flying low over the runway, stopping briefly on the runway and taking off again, touching down and then taking off again, flying the established “missed approach” procedure, or pulling up at the airport restaurant and ordering a meatball sandwich.

Such freedom of choice is a beautiful thing, but it strikes me that while I have since then heard many controllers tell pilots that they were cleared for the option, I have never heard a pilot ask for it.   Maybe I just don’t have enough hours in the air to have heard it, but I also imagine it’s a rather awkward request.   It’s kind of like going up to your dad when you’re a kid and saying “Dad, can I do anything I want today?”

Somehow, I guess, there’s something rather perplexing about having to ask for nothing in particular, although frankly, the idea is appealing.   Maybe that’s what makes me difficult to live with or be around for too long.   Do you mind if I either take out the garbage, do the dishes, fold the laundry, watch football, or drive a stake through my own heart?   I imagine you would go right to the stake.  Better, I suppose, to be binary.  

Binary is just another three-syllable word for decision.  You’re either this or that.  When I heard someone say the other day that falling in love was “a decision,” I was mortified.   Such a cold, unfeeling thing, just a light switch that gets turned on or off.    It’s just plain crazy.   It isn’t the way the world works.   It’s as though these words on the screen consist of nothing more than zeroes and ones!   

Stating that love is a decision can be comforting, I suppose, if one believes that it’s possible to simply decide whether to love someone.    Just switch on that pheromone pump and turn on the ignition.  Although the idea can be useful, the romantic in me just won’t stand for it.  Love is about spontaneity, passion and mystery.   It encapsulates, or in fact it is, a magical concoction of joy, terror, vulnerability and depth.  It is the paradoxical, ineffable reason for things, the space between the body of a candle’s flame and the leap as it separates and disappears.

I do realize that there can be no shades of gray without mixing the inevitable blacks and whites.   And it is just as certain that there can be no white without black.   For that matter, there can be no middle without a beginning and an end, but isn’t the concept of a middle an artifact of the myth that there really is such a thing as a beginning and an end?    Maybe all there is a very long and wide middle, maybe all that exists are shades of gray and that it is the blacks and whites we imagine.   Doesn’t pi go on forever?  Maybe Donald Trump never existed and it’s all been a really bad dream.

Sometimes being binary can be a helpful way of making up one’s mind when faced with life’s overwhelming choices.   There was a woman I knew in graduate school named Penny Paris who couldn’t make up her mind about anything, including whether to remain in graduate school.   Eventually we came to label her degree of ambivalence the “Penny Paris Syndrome.”  I don’t know what came of her, or even if she is still ticking, but just in case, please know we all loved you, and you should be proud that there is a syndrome named after you.   You may not think you accomplished much in graduate school, but there you are.

You can’t really use the word “binary” anymore without at least thinking about gender.   Let’s face it, who in their right mind would want to be either a male or a female?   Truly, it sucks to be both.   Such societal burdens, such stereotypes to violate.   Give me non-binary neurodiversity any day of the week.   You see, while I may ask for a full-stop landing, what I really want from that Great Controller in the Sky is to be cleared for the option.