To Fly

At the Smithsonian there is a movie called “To Fly” that was their first movie and done extremely well in the now ever popular IMAX format, or whatever the equivalent was then that made your nauseous to watch. It was also a movie that was filmed, at least the opening, and some of the early flight scenes were filmed, at the Sugarbush Airport, in Warren, Vermont, which was a very short strip of very firm grass, and then later rolled gravel and maybe now a bit of asphalt. The beginning was filmed there with a little “band stand,” and a four piece band made to look like the band members were from the period of time when the first balloon flight was made. My brother was the trumpet player in that opening, and so we as a family went to the Smithsonian a long, long time ago to see the film. I stared at the floor most of the time, as did my grandmother, because the movement really bothered us.

This piece has absolutely nothing to do with that movie.

“…I get sick when I fly because I am afraid the plane will crash. I don’t think Dramamine will help.” Yet another quote from a favorite movie of mine and one that is very relevant to me. No I am not afraid to fly, I used to feel sick when I flew when I was younger, but now I have flown so much that it does not bother me. I am perhaps afraid to “fly.”

“…take these broken wings and learn to fly. All your life. You were only waiting for this moment to arise.” The Beatles knew something. They actually knew a lot of things about everything, but this is “bang on” as some would say from whence they came. Sorry I slipped there for a minute.

What if the moment has long since arisen and you didn’t know it, or missed it, or worse yet ignored it? What if the moment arose and you were all the time expecting a different moment? What if the moment arose and you knew it, felt it, were ready for it, but could not get yourself, allow yourself, to “fly.”

All these things are a concern to me, and much, much more. When we are younger, at least for me, sometimes moments come and go and we are unaware, or we let them go by, or we may see one and run after it with everything we have and ride the updraft as long as our wings will take us with all the energy and passion and reckless abandon of youth, and if it was the wrong moment, or if you hadn’t quite figured it out, or if we just didn’t have our “broken wings” fully healed it really didn’t matter because we would try again sometime soon.

As we get older, the wings take longer to heal, we do not notice the moments as readily, and the reckless abandon has long since abandon us, or at least some of us. Some would call it the “eye of the tiger,” and yes I am both dating myself and stereotyping myself all at the same time, but it is something real that either goes away completely, or at least feels that way.

How do you continue to take new risks, in career, in relationships, in life in general? How do you continue to put yourself out there, leave the cat at home by herself, and take chances? I wish I knew the answers, and I wish for me it was just a getting older thing.

There are people, I have known a lot of them and a bunch of them are friends of mine, that do not have the “chip” in their heads that says “hey wait a minute this is too big a risk,” or “ what if this doesn’t work,” or worse yet, “you can’t pull this off.” I respect the hell out of the friends of mine that have just kept moving forward and taking risks and either not worrying about what may go wrong, or perhaps knowing that they simply had to make it work, but they have just continued to have success. I wish I could be in their heads for some period of time, just to see what it feels like to feel that way.

It is not that I have not had success. In fact, as I have mentioned before, I have had enough success over the years to be on my third life, but I also know I have let some moments go along the way that a purely confident person would have just jumped at. I am the most insecure person I know that has ever had a job telling people how to do what they do better. Whether it be coaching, teaching, consulting, producing, it does not matter what I have done, those are all professions where you tell people what to do, how to do it, and you point out when there is room for improvement because you are aiming for as close to perfection as possible. How does one do these things if they are less than perfect, especially significantly less than perfect?

I have no answers, but something a mentor of mine once said to me a long time ago, about fifteen years to be precise, seems very appropriate here, “if you think you are not doing a job well, like you have just been faking it, if you have been feeling that way for more than six months you are no longer faking it.” There is a more famous quote, and more succinct, “fake it ‘till you make it.” I am going be a year older in a week and that is a year older than old, so I must be good at faking something by now, but I would still like to find a way to truly “spread – these – broken wings and learn to fly.”

There are so many more “moments” I would still like to capture.

Thank you again for getting this far with me.