The steady hand and the flying machine

Responsibilities of the ground melt away in the air. They look tiny and insignificant, like a thousand cars lined up end-to-end on a street no wider than a toothpick.

Not to say life is easier in the sky. It is a deeply unnatural condition to suspend oneself in the air between one and forty thousand feet above ground level, and you will not forget this.

Alertness is a prerequisite, but the machine does not reward skittishness nor overreaction. Calmness is a prerequisite, but the machine does not serve the sluggish. Attention to the Right Stuff is required: the stuff of ancient elements, not only wind but all the others. In terms of the modern we speak not only of velocity vectors but of all their rates of change.

All this in three dimensions as opposed to the two we plot on paper and traverse by car. All this in the fourth dimension, time, that necessary coordinator of action in space, that indicator of the results of our actions. All this in the fifth dimension, that field of countably infinite possible timelines. We rehearse the scenarios we aspire to be in as well as the ones we dread. We act in that higher-dimensional dreamscape known to the mathematician, the yogi, and the great martial artist. This is not to be grandiose. We simply define and then keep within acceptable bounds, until we define them anew.

And though the tolerances are narrow, the paper is often rumpled, the pen is extraordinarily thin — the possibilities of this blank slate are as vast as anything afforded by the neurons of mind or the muscle of man. The machine is the enabler, a metric ton of metal sailing through the open sky, if nothing more.

The thinness of the pen rewards a steady hand. Next to it in its desk drawer lies a question: can one produce masterpieces as timeless as da Vinci, or is one confined to the stifling brutalism of Le Corbusier? This pen has always been a sword. Performance, machismo, bravado and ire are aspects of its native tongue.

Why then, oft threatening murder, does the flying machine still offer deliverance from evil, salvation from the ground and its chains and its clamor? I do not know. I must yet come closer to God, perhaps in the way of Sisyphus or Icarus, or perhaps through a happier story, but in any case alone, headed skyward in the low-frequency comfort of the engine’s din.

I am writing this as a student pilot with roughly 18 hours and a long way to go. I look forward to the journey.