Flying Life: About time

I recently watched a movie, About Time, in which the main character discovered he could do exactly that. At first, he goes back to fix things he’d like to do differently, such as get a girlfriend or help his friends avoid disaster. Soon, however, he realizes time travel offers an even more precious gift: the ability to relive the best days, and to see people he can no longer see. By the end of the story, time travel has taught him the opposite of what we’d expect. He makes the decision to no longer travel back in time; rather, he determines to live each day as if he came back just to live this one.

The movie brought to mind a gentleman I met out at the airport one day. He was sitting on the bench outside the flight school, watching the airplanes taxi out. For some reason, I stopped to talk, which is not something that comes naturally to me. I’m usually more of a keep-your-head-down, get-your-work-done person. But if I hadn’t taken the time, I would have missed out on his story, and I think I’m probably the one who most needed to hear it.

The man said he was recently retired, but that he had loved every minute of his corporate flying career. Given the chance, he would do it all over again: the rainy days, the gusty winds, even the sometimes-difficult passengers. Like the time traveler, that newly retired pilot had the perspective that our time is fleeting. We cannot fly forever, even if we are lucky enough to do it until our very last day. I tried to carry that wisdom with me as I said goodbye and walked out to do a flight I wasn’t particularly looking forward to, teaching a new student the traffic pattern on a 95-degree-Fahrenheit Memphis day.

If you could time travel back through your own aviation experiences, what flight would you redo? Maybe I would have better prepared for that flight where I failed to check freezing levels and ended up scaring myself nearly to death when the windshield instantly iced over on our descent. Or perhaps I wouldn’t have decided that taking off into 30-knot gusting winds was a good idea on what was supposed to be a fun birthday flight for myself and my 80-year-old boss. But then again, scaring ourselves nearly to death is, unfortunately, the way we learn valuable lessons in aviation. And those mistakes we’ve lived through teach us how to avoid making even bigger ones. Now, if there’s broken equipment or questionable weather, those past unpleasant experiences have made it pretty easy for me to draw the line.

So, if not time traveling to fix a mistake, then maybe we could repeat some of the really great flights. I’d love to do that trip into Oshkosh with my brother again. Or I might fly back to Paris, Tennessee, and have one more picnic lunch with my grandmother. Or maybe it would be the corporate flight into Washington, D.C., on the day Donald Trump got elected. The conversations in the hotel bar that night sure were interesting. Or maybe I’d be sitting beside my husband as we flew over the Smoky Mountains and marveled at the East Tennessee autumn, or maybe...or maybe...or maybe.

Looking back, I can see how special those experiences were, but at the time, I remember worrying about one thing or another instead of fully enjoying the flight. Whether it was traffic congestion at Oshkosh or crosswinds in Paris or contingency plans over the mountains, I constantly had something on my mind other than the sheer joy of flying. Is that just how life works? Do we only enjoy the big moments after they have already passed?

Psychologists say that’s not how it has to be, and that there actually are several ways to help ourselves fully enjoy the moment. First, we have to reduce anxiety. In an airplane, that might mean more preflight preparation, a refresher flight lesson, or simply taking another pilot along to help carry the workload.

Second, we need to look for something beautiful. That’s certainly not hard in an airplane. For me, it’s always that moment when we break out above the clouds and see the sun, knowing that nobody on the ground has seen it yet.

Finally, when our minds start whirling with a million different thoughts, we can take time to focus on breathing—realizing that although flying is often about getting from point A to point B, sometimes it’s OK to just enjoy the thrill of being in the air. Here’s hoping we can take the perspective of our retired friend to make the most of the flights we have right now, because we don’t get to repeat them.

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