This Aviation Lifestyle
After The Dreaming- New Year, New Work Begins
More than a great literary tradition was established when the various American Transcendentalist thinkers and writers surfaced in the mid-1800s; a new method of analyzing personhood along with both an individual’s and society’s reaction to living out life was being presented into the public realm. Though an obviously careful discernment needs to be taken with a casual perusal of this movement, Transcendentalism offers up some worthy viewpoints regarding imagination, transformation and possibility that we can utilize for propelling our New Year’s resolutions into action as this brand new year of 2009 commences.
Many of us have undoubtedly run across a quote or two from the most famous sages of Transcendentalism, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. One of my personal favorites that has inspired me since high school days where toting a well-used copy of Thoreau’s “Walden” around in one’s backpack was standard practice is, “Do not worry if you have built your castles in the air. They are where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.” Ah, imagination and realism, the dreaming along with the actual working- this made sense to my pragmatic personality all those years ago and still resonates today. So much within the world of aviation is an ongoing processing of putting very hard work behind seemingly elusive dreams: from Leonardo da Vinci’s sketches aiming at putting a human into flight to the Wright Brothers’ actuality of this realized at Kitty Hawk on to the Space Race between the U.S. and USSR during the Cold War era; and now another space race is heating up yet again but this time it’s to put actual civilians into orbit as paying customers on regularly scheduled flights. 2004’s successful flight of SpaceShipOne certainly opens up this future possibility.
In the novel “Orbit” by John J. Nance, an ordinary man wins a commercial space flight and experiences both what he thought he would in orbiting the Earth and a lot more that he never could have imagined. It is an interesting take on the perspective of an average-joe types experiencing space travel and also parallels our society’s lazy desire to gain an opportunity without doing much to deserve it as the character Kip Dawson soon realizes and then laments as to his all too casual attitude regarding the training he was given beforehand becomes glaringly evident when his situation up in space turns awry. The infrastructure, operations and enjoyment of aviation in all forms and experiences calls for an underlying seriousness amid the dreams, aspirations and deeply felt emotions. It is a realm all its own. What an individual can casually approach within say fly fishing, hiking, hosting a party, sketching, playing violin and other fun hobbies or sidelines that a person like myself enjoys is very different from having aviation as a hobby, least not as a career. Piloting or being a passenger in a plane is serious business. I remember my first few flight lessons where, flying through the air, I was working hard to keep the attitude indicator level and any slight banking turns as smooth as possible. My hands gripped the controls as I felt my forehead break into a good sweat: it was exhilarating and terrifying at the same time. Me flying an airplane, wow- a dream come true and now here directly at hand, in the “now” was the time for placing foundations under it. Yes, I knew my instructor was really the person in control but she had handed the controls over and with this realization, it was up to me at least for awhile to stop dreaming and start concentrating like crazy.
My personal example is of course a very small one I well realize when compared to my husband James’ journey from private pilot to aerobatic pilot to captain with an airline now flying jets full of passengers across the east coast, into Canada and around the Bahamas. His dream of flying started off as a nightmare- the dreaded fear of flying. As he strove to conquer that, he literally fell in love with aviation. We began to make it a huge part of our married life by becoming a part of the greater aviation community through volunteering, writing, fly-ins and then his mid-life career change which resulted in James now being a professional airline pilot. Another one of Thoreau’s encouraging quotes comes to mind here and is actually part of a greeting card that I framed and put in our bathroom: “Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you’ve imagined.” For dreams to be fully realized, they must eventually have an active direction stemming outwards from them- a path, a purpose upon which we can begin to move ourselves along.
The question then is what keeps us from moving along the pathway of our lives towards realizing dreams we dare to dream for ourselves? There’s a tinge of fear in this daring: to be courageous by taking a chance, to put actions behind our ideas and, with the case of almost everything within aviation, to put a lot of time, commitment, hard work and money towards that as well. Orville and Wilbur Wright knew this all too vividly when fully realizing their dogged pursuit to put a plane up into the air on that fateful day in 1903 when, if even only for a few seconds, possibility and probability finally met up to begin the greater opening up of a whole new facilitation of existence for humankind. More than 400 years had passed between Leonardo da Vinci’s sketches made in 1485 when human lift-off commenced defying our centuries of personal earthen weightiness to terra firma. And decades later in 1961, Yuri Gagarin’s daring, and fear-laden, enaction of becoming the first human to orbit the earth took the human experience another step forward into the dualistic stratosphere of imagination and diligent preparation. As Emerson succinctly stated it, “He has not learned the lesson of life who does not every day surmount a fear.” What if those dreamers had not conquered their fears of failure, ridicule, lessened personal comfort and outright safety? What if indeed!
And for us to be thinking about for ourselves in the here and now of 2009: how much actual resolution lies behind our New Year’s Resolutions and lifetime dreaming? The traditional Transcendentalists of our nation’s past would ask that our inner lives and intuition direct our outer lives and actions. They would challenge us to take all that inspired dreaming going on within our heads and hearts on into its natural resolution of action and direction.
To be inspired by aviation and our experiences within it is to inspire ourselves on towards even more realizations of our dreams, our proverbial “castles in the air.” Happy New Year to my readers and sincere brand shiny New Year wishes for all of your future possibilities just ahead on the horizon…
by Lachlan Ivy