Fly Past

Professionally, 2008 was indeterminate. Muddy. My experience starting a new venture is hard to compare with others’, especially given the amorphousness of consulting. But I confess that the ghosts of (regular) paychecks past have visited me more than once. I described the ups and downs of being self-employed to a childhood friend. Tridib put my ambivalence in stark relief by recalling our shared petite bourgeoisie upbringing in India. “Let’s face it,” he said, “you are basically a government servant type, as am I.” Ah, the bracing bluntness of old friends. Nevertheless, I remain determined to fight the entrepreneurial fight!

On the personal front, 2008 has been a year of highs. Chief among them was the opportunity to deepen and broaden my flying logbook. I flew two near-transcontinental trips – from California to Duluth, MN, thence to Springfield, IL and back, and a few weeks later, from California to Appleton, WI and back for that incomparable fly-in, Airventure. Each trip consumed an entire day, with actual flying time being in the 10+ hour range. The autopilot engaged and the plane purring contentedly, the long flight legs provided a great opportunity to observe and reflect.

Flying, as has been oft-observed, is humanity’s second-oldest collective dream, up there with immortality. To be above it all, to “slip the surly bonds of earth”, is divine sensation indeed. But flying is only partly sensual or spiritual. What it provides is a rarity in our circumscribed modern existence: a truly existential experience. No other enterprise places one so actively in the moment: existence precedes essence. The pilot’s actions determine the lived reality.

This connection is far more visceral than people who only fly commercial realize. In the few moments of take-off in a small place, you feel the earth’s slipping grasp as you as you escape her embrace. Within a few minutes, you feel her below you change from protective habitation to an incomprehensibly alien desolation wilderness.

And then, there is the magical experience of being in charge. A trained private pilot, in a well-maintained aircraft, is unambiguously in command. Not the air traffic controller. Not his boss or boss’s boss. Not even – for once – his wife! Before the flight, he decides on the route and stops. During the flight, he decides how to address the vicissitudes of weather and circumstance. After the flight, he decides what he takes from that particular flight by how he analyzes and logs it. Very little in life is so purpose-driven.

After all that analysis though, I return to the notion that the attraction of flight is elemental. Purely child’s play. The Kiwi poet Allen Curnow expresses it beautifully in A Time of Day:

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A small charge for admission. Believers only.
Who present their tickets where a five-
barred farm gate grapes on its chain

and will file on to the thinly grassed paddock.
Out of the afternoon pearl-dipped light the
dung-green biplane descended

and will return later, and later, late as
already it is. We are all born
of cloud again, in a caul

of linen lashed to the air-frame of the age
smelling of the scorched raw castor oil
nine whirling cylinders pelt

up-country-smelling senses with, narcotic
joyrides, these helmeted barnstormers
heavier scented than hay,

harnesses, horsepiss, fleeces, phosphates and milk
under the fingernails. I’m pulling at
my father’s hand Would the little

boy for selling the tickets? One helmet smiles
bending over yes, please let me,
my father hesitates, I

pull and I don’t let go.

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Happy 2009!

Read the complete post at http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-Knr1w50ieqiJfWeRW8dTq0U7x3Kx?p=91