Tag: flying

Flying Apart

I try to be even tempered about flying commercial airlines these days. What choice do I have? But it is not an experience I ever look forward to.

In the old days (twenty+ years ago), I used to love flying. Airplanes took me to some pretty cool places around the world: Argentina, South Korea, India, Egypt, Europe, Costa Rica, Hong Kong and all over Canada, to name a few destinations.

I was also accustomed to some rough road travel outside the Western world. I’m thinking of being part of a mule train for three days in the Himalayas. The ten days I spent riding across the Andes on horseback with an adventurous group of fellow travelers.

And fighting for breathing room on some of the oldest and ricketiest so-called buses in India. Vast numbers of locals sat on the roof and hung off the sides. Talk about held together by duct tape and chewing gum.

I loved that kind of traveling. Not only were the experiences cool, but they made for interesting memories. Now airline travel is just about as rough and memories of the experiences are not so great.

I loved flying and air travel so much I applied to become a flight attendant when I was 17. Too young, I learned. “Write back to us when you turn 19,” they wrote encouragingly in my rejection letter.

By then, I’d been accepted at university and my life went in an entirely different direction. I always wonder how life would have turned out had I reapplied to the airline instead of university when I was 19. Life is all about choices and I’d made mine.

In short flights between my home province of New Brunswick to see my Dad in Newfoundland, we almost anticipated being blocked out of St. John’s by fog. That meant rerouting us to Gander in the days when airlines paid for the hotel and supplied meal vouchers. It was the very epitome of excitement when we were teenagers.

Fast forward several decades later. Free meals for flight delays? Ha. Helpful airline personnel? If they are civil, I feel I have scored major. Forget efficiency. I just paid $200 to transport an empty box on this flight with me as baggage. (Yes. Really. It was less expensive than shipping the goods I will put in it another way, but seriously?)

My husband was a pilot with Pan American World Airways back in the day. They served prime rib roast beef prepared in an on board oven in first class with cloth napkins, free wine and real silver cutlery. The linen napkins had a small buttonhole so gentlemen could attach them to their shirt. Bygone era.

So when this Youtube video by Robert Reich popped up, it made sense of a lot going on in the aviation industry these days. As intelligent, funny and charming as economist Robert Reich is, his message is most discouraging.

Even my husband – a bona fide world traveler and former commercial airline pilot who had flown too many hours in his career to even count – is a most reluctant airline passenger these days. We have settled for embellishing our everyday meals with the linen napkins he kept as souvenirs from aviation’s Golden Age.

Airline travel is never going to be again what airline travel once was. Robert Reich explains why. It’s about 6 minutes long.

Are You A Hammer?

“When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”

This quote is variously attributed to so many people that I wont attribute it to any. I prefer to play with what the concept might actually mean.

For some, it speaks to the narrow-mindedness of seeing only one use for a particular tool. There is something in there about opposites attracting and seeing something that the other needs. It can be argued that hammers and nails need each other to feel effective in the world.

There is also something in there about sticking to scripts we have internalized and faithfully observe. What we have learned. And in many areas of life, there are absolute “rights” and “wrongs” about how to do things.

Apply those hard-and-fast rules and success will be your reward. I find this particularly comforting when I’m flying. I like knowing that every pilot has been tested and approved by a very stringent set of standards on their skills and competence to fly the airplane.

This quote has also been interpreted to explain cognitive bias. Cognitive bias makes a mockery of so many academic pursuits. But can we apply the same formulae to artists and philosophers? The boundaries are much more blurry in these pursuits. Laws are at work that can best be described as fluid. Creative pursuits are more often informed by culture, zeitgeist, current affairs and spirituality, among others.

I should know. I have a masters in sociology. To this day, studying social groups requires a methodology that is hard to pin down with the traditional “scientific method.” It is more like a smorgasbord of journalism and keeping a diary. Indeed, the term “participant observer” was concocted as a methodology back in the day for what we would now likely call “embedding.”

That sticky bit of intellectual rationalization led to huge disclaimers assuring readers that the sociologists had gone to great lengths to ensure and preserve their objectivity. That strikes me as funny. Along the lines of “methinks the lady doth protest too much.” If sociologists were so sure that their research methods were pure and unsullied, disclaimers would not likely necessary.

As in the example above, it’s good to know that pilots are following a successful flying formula. The gap between engineering and arts has always been huge intellectually. Engineers – like pilots – learn skills based on certain immutable laws and forces. We count on them to do that.

It does seem we all have certain built-in competencies. Maths ability over writing ability is a common example. But when we only stick to what we know and pursue only those areas where we are sure we can excel, growth stops. Without the natural human tendency to explore and keep trying out new ideas, the world would be bereft of innovation.

We often end up balancing two opposing forces in our lives: the comfort of the familiar or the excitement (and danger) of pursuing new challenges. Maturity informs us which path to pick when usually because we have already screwed up in this regard a few times.

And there is always that great X factor: the unknowns of pursuing a particular path and the general uncertainty of the future.

So which are you? A hammer, a nail or something else entirely. Are you locked into stale and outdated ways of thinking and acting that aren’t moving you forward in the direction you want to move? I think about this periodically. I haven’t actually decided which one I am.

Certainly in recent months, I have moved well beyond almost any of my known patterns and ways of being. It’s stressful, for sure, but also satisfying. It has been the price I have had to pay for any new skill, experience, accomplishment or romance in my life.

They didn’t all work out the way I wanted, obviously, but they all expanded my worldview and understanding every single time. That seems like a fair tradeoff for the inherent risks in following unfamiliar paths. I think I’ve learned enough to modulate my chances whatever path I take.

So there’s that.