“A love of learning has a lot to do with learning that we are loved.”
— Fred Rogers, of Mister Roger’s Neighborhood
Moving Forward
Most of us stop learning when we reach the plateau that our environment requires. Personal needs and social forces are satisfied when we resolve a situation. It’s natural to take a break and relax, but in doing so we risk becoming complacent and compliant. The rewards of satisfaction are limited.
There’s something insufficient about following a path to a goal. It doesn’t fully explore the territory of opportunities. You may get to your destination, but you won’t really know the reality behind the appearance. It is so often that we find the partner, friend, or relationship we set out to locate, only to discover over time that what we found was an incomplete picture.
It’s not enough to be a learner, you must be a skeptic. You must focus on what might be possible, not what others say is there or can’t be done. Learning to be smart takes a sense of direction and a measure of disbelief.
Growing more capable requires inventing a program that aims beyond your reach and committing to it. A coach or counselor can help, teachers might play a small role, but you must be aware of the larger possibilities. Only a sense of what you have to gain can motivate the digressions, uncertain risks, and inevitable failures.
Flying
A friend suggested that I fly soarplanes. These are high performance, single seat airplanes that fly at low altitude without an engine, ascend by locating updrafts, and can stay airborne for hours on a good day. I knew little about the sport, but found a soaring airport and started talking lessons.
The sport of soaring requires both special planes and special airports. The whole airport must be devoted to these airplanes and their unpredictable nature. You can see why the sport is expensive: not only do you need to own a special plane, you need to own a special airport. And while the pilots don’t run the airport, they are involved in its operation and set the tone. Unlike flying powered airplanes, there is nothing practical about soaring.
In addition to the skill of controlling and maintaining one’s aircraft there is a wonderful breadth of topics to be learned. This appealed to my intense nature and generalist mentality. Most important is the issue of navigation as these airplanes rarely fly from point to point but meander beneath ever moving clouds looking for updrafts that can be felt but rarely seen. Updrafts can be deduced or inferred from a knowledge of weather, geography, and atmospherics. While you get to know the land around your airport, the air is always changing.
As ground dwellers we do not experience the vertical movements in the atmosphere. These movements are as powerful as the winds that sweep horizontally, but they have different structures. There are updrafts, downdrafts, shears, rolls, fronts, and layers. This creates the turbulence you feel as a passenger in a jet, and they feel even stronger in a slow moving craft. They will easily throw you out of your seat if you are not tightly strapped down. Moving through the air puts you in an entirely new world, one that few people are aware exists right above them.
The whole field of aerodynamics, which is largely set and unchanging for powered airplanes, is critical for planes whose air worthiness depends on their optimal performance: light weight, low drag, large wingspan, and high strength. You’re not driving, you’re coasting: always watching your speed, angle, pitch, yaw, and rate of descent, and all the while you must be aware of your meandering location.
The whole sport is one of dead reckoning, which means judging everything by eye and by feel. You may be flying over landscapes you’ve never seen before, depending on the invisible updrafts to keep you airborne, and hoping the weather doesn’t move against you. You may have a destination, but it will take luck and skill to get there. You’re in danger if you’re forced to land anywhere but at an airport, and the few, small airports you’re looking for can only be seen when you’re almost right above them.
People Make Their Environment
For more ideas on how to create love in your life, book a free call on my calendar:
