Learning to Fly

When I was quite young, flying came naturally to me. It was just something I did, like walking. Then somewhere along the line I began to feel doubtful about flying. My logical brain kept telling me that flying, for a human being, was impossible. I don't know where I got that idea, but anyway, there it was.

At some point in elementary school I stopped flying altogether. I just went on with life and forgot about it. I went through school, then college, then stepped out into the world to establish myself. Trouble was, the economy was very bad right then, and the competition for even menial jobs was tough.

Early on, I took any job I could. I made sandwiches at a shop in the Cannery. I delivered flowers to grocery stores. I even drove a Yellow Cab in San Francisco for about a month. Then the company went bankrupt, and I was out of a job again. Hard times.

There was nothing I could really sink my teeth into, nothing that required the degree I had worked so hard to get. Eventually San Francisco beat me down, and I had to move back home where my parents lived. There, I finally got a job that I could call a career, working for Sears as a department manager. It even required a degree.

It was a stressful job and frankly, I wasn't very good at it. Often I would just go to the stockroom, find a quiet corner in my department's stocking shelves, and for hours I would be happy. Bored, but happy.

One night I had a dream. Pegasus came to me, and I was in awe. His sleek white body rippled with muscles. He was gentle but yet had a fire in him. He invited me to get on his back and go flying with him. Now don't get me wrong. He didn't talk to me like Mr. Ed or anything, but somehow I knew what he was saying. I'm not crazy, after all.

So I climbed on his back, my knees tucked under his wings, lay my head on his neck and off we went. It was nighttime, and we flew over the lights of the city, then out into the country, then... then... I don't really remember. But I got such a visceral feel of what it felt like to fly. Oddly, the feeling was familiar.

He came to me a few times more, and then I decided maybe I should try to fly on my own. Of course, I knew it was impossible for humans to do. But what the heck, strange things happen that we all can't explain. For some reason, I went to the playground of the elementary school I had attended. Not real sure why. I stood on the ground and tried to elevate myself.

For quite awhile I tried to elevate myself and laughed when nothing happened. Figures, I thought. I stood there, closed my eyes, and tried to see me rising. I tightened my face muscles like I was trying to dead lift 400 pounds and grunted. Nothing worked. But I kept trying. This went on for months, maybe years.

Then one day for no reason I could figure out, I lifted off the ground ever so slightly. It was so slight that I wasn't sure I really did it. So I tried it again, and this time I could see sunlight underneath my shoes. I was stunned. Here I had believed nobody could do something like this for real, not like Chris Mindfreak or other illusionists, but for real, and yet I had done it. I couldn't believe it.

For some reason, I didn't tell anybody. Maybe I was afraid of the critics and disbelievers. Maybe I was afraid of the press and the scrutiny. Maybe I was afraid what my family and friends would think. In any case, I just kept quiet about it and kept on practicing. I started getting better and better, but I wanted to do more.

One day while practicing in my former elementary school's playground, I looked up at the roof of the school and just suddenly flew up there. It blew me away. I was scared, excited, and amazed. I threw my head back and blew out a short quick breath. I looked back down at the school playground, and just as suddenly as I had flown up, I flew straight back down to the ground. I hadn't even thought about flying up to the roof and back. It just kind of happened.

I wanted to yell, clap my hands, and dance, but I didn't dare draw any attention to myself. Even if people saw it, I knew a lot of people wouldn't believe it. But this opened up a whole new way of thinking for me, a whole new perspective on life. If I could fly up to the roof of the school, could I fly even farther? How far? And could I control it? How was I going to do all of this? What else was possible?

My gut-level feeling told me that there was something more, something beyond my imagination, but how to get there? I needed answers, but frankly I didn't even know the right questions to ask to get to those answers.

In my time away from work I continued to practice flying. I got so hooked on it and the possibilities that I was thirsty for more. One night, after a not-so-good session of flying, I got so frustrated that I wasn't learning anything new, sat down on the ground, and just flat out cried. Help me God, I asked, looking up toward the sky. But the sky was silent.

Once when practicing, I purposefully shot straight up into the sky. It was overcast, and I flew straight into a big bank of clouds. It was kind of neat in there, all misty and gray-white. I couldn't see very far. I wondered just how far up I could go and started going up, up, from there. I got really high, breaking out of the clouds - so high in fact that it was like looking out of an airplane when I looked down at the ground. It was exhilarating but I was still a little unsure of myself then, so I came on down.

Flying horizontal to the ground was another problem altogether. A lot of times I could free-fly with no particular destination, looking at the ground, the woods, the ocean, the desert, and the mountains. But when it came to focusing on a specific area and flying there, I had trouble. I would look at something in that area, like a light pole or a tree, and think of it as a magnet pulling me toward it. Usually it worked, sometimes pulling me pretty fast to whatever I was looking at. It worked, but I still did not have a lot of control over my flying.

The whole problem of flying with any focus became a big issue. This was much harder than anything I had tried to do before. I couldn't yet fly around corners. I had to focus on something, go there, turn toward the next direction I wanted to fly to, focus on that, fly there, and so on. It was a real pain, but I didn't know any other way to do it. On top of everything else, I was starting to notice so much while flying now that I often got distracted and lost my focus totally, sometimes tumbling back down to the ground.

One day I was practicing this focused kind of flying and wasn't really aware of much else, when I sensed somebody off to my right. I just about fell out of the sky. Someone else had learned how to fly. I stuttered and stumbled but managed to ask this guy what he was doing. "Flying, of course," he smiled.

I landed on the ground and so did he, right beside me. He was much older than me, had long gray hair drawn together in a ponytail in the back. He wore jeans and a long-sleeved collared shirt, something like you might see someone wearing on a ranch. The thing that struck me most was his eyes. They were bright, and I could see a kind of reflection deep in his eyes. They looked like they were ready to laugh. He smiled at me. "How are you doing with your own flying?"

"Oh, pretty good. Having a little trouble with a few things, but basically I'm good," I said, feigning confidence.

"Cool. Want to fly with me a bit?" he asked.

Still stunned by even meeting this man, in a bit of a daze I said, "Uh, sure."

He flew so gracefully, but you could tell there was a lot of power behind his flying, too. I was doing a pretty good job staying next to him for awhile, even able to turn easy corners. Then he turned right into a headwind. I turned with him, and the wind hit me like a hurricane, blowing me back a bit. I struggled to go forward. I tried various ways of getting myself to fly again, but no method I knew worked. I was stuck, and stuck bad.

Meanwhile, the man I had just met continued to fly with grace and power. He had turned into the headwind effortlessly, with no change in his speed or direction. It hadn't flustered him at all. Finally, he saw that I was not with him, and he flew back to me.

"What's wrong?" he asked.

"This is one of those problems I was telling you about. I can't seem to fly into a strong headwind. It just tosses me about," I complained. "How did you learn to do it?"

His eyes twinkled as he said, "I asked the wind."

"What?" I asked, a little irritated that he didn't just tell me outright. "Ask it what? How to fly into it? And the wind actually answers you?" I raised an eyebrow and smiled. "Do you think I'm so gullible as to believe that?" I started to chuckle and expected him to join in because I had caught him at his game, but he just smiled slightly.

I cocked my head, puzzled, my face getting more serious. Did he really mean he asked the wind? "Well, what does the wind say?"

"You have to ask the wind yourself to find out for yourself."

The old man aggravated me. This guy obviously knew how to fly into a strong headwind, and yet he was refusing to tell me how to do it. Instead, he was feeding me riddles. Before I could say anything more, he said, "I'll see you tomorrow," and flew away, leaving me floating there with a confused look on my face.

Meeting him that day was just the beginning. Somehow, every day he found me and we flew together. He gave me flying tasks to do, and gradually I began to learn. He never gave me direct answers but instead asked me questions that led me to my own answers. Basically, he jump-started my flying education and no doubt saved me years of trying to figure it out on my own.

We flew around, and I started noticing that there were other flyers like myself, sometimes a whole family of flyers. They always seemed to be going about their own business but if you spoke to them, they were usually friendly and upbeat. Apparently the world is full of flyers. I just hadn't noticed them before.

One day I was talking to the old man and asked him why he never just told me the answers to the questions I had but let me figure it them out for myself.

He just said, "I never told you the answers because you already knew them." That had to sink in a little bit. He went on to say, "At this point, you don't really need a teacher because now you know the way to get the answers to any question you have," he said. The old man had always said that nature is the greatest university there is.

So why am I finally telling you about this, after 25 years since I met the old man? I guess I want people to know that yes, flying is possible. But it takes a long, long time to learn, a lot of patience, and you need a good teacher if you want to take some shortcuts. Good flying teachers are scarce these days, but you can find them. Used to be there were more, like a hundred years ago, but their numbers got fewer and fewer. It could be that the teachers just couldn't get many students. The younger folks had been brought up to think logically, now that the world was in the industrial age. Logical people knew that flying for humans was impossible, and it made no sense to them to learn to do something that was impossible. Many, many teachers went to their graves having only taught one or two people to fly, if any. It was sad.

Looking back, I remembered the day that I had been so frustrated that I wasn't learning anything new, and I had sat on the ground and cried, asking God for help. The sky had been silent, but I realize now that God had been listening after all.

Perhaps one day you and I will run into each other, flying. I certainly hope so. Keep watching the sky.