Learning to Fly
So, the context is flight.
Not birds, nor those deliciously eccentric Darwin Awards ‘Birdman’ nominees who try to fly off the end of a pier into the freezing English Channel of a July week-end each year. The former were designed for flight. The latter are mad, in the fun sense, and they get very wet. We were not designed for flight, and almost all who attempt it, without some sort of jet or prop engine, will fail, or even die. So, we are looking at the jet version, unless you are a field doctor in some seriously boon dock region where single prop is the only thing on hand. Of course I chose the virtuous-sounding option. You could of course be taking that faintly risky flight option because you are bored to f*** of watching your local version of porn, that being insects getting it on, buzzing wildy across your fly screen door, hence a potentially dangerous air flip to the nearest town for a few beers could seem a very good idea. After all, boredom can kill more effectively than a single prop flight.
But, back to the more conventional flight routine, as in lots of people sealed into a metal tube, moving at high speed and at very high altitude. Regardless of the statistical evidence of the same old, same old – along the lines of ‘you’re more likely to be bitten by Luis Suarez than die in a plane accident’, we bump up against our most primal survival mechanism in a situation where there is not very much we can do if something goes wrong. We know that, even in our wildest imagination, jumping to safety from a plummeting plane is not going to happen, and the inflatable evacuation slides don’t have a hell of a lot of chance, even if we happen to crash into a convenient water body–basic physics, as in the descent velocity of a rapidly moving, aerodynamically designed projectile into deep water. Flight staff have to grind through the not-very-likely-to-work safety procedures, and a lot of us (though sure as hell not all) are polite enough to pay some attention to the rictus smile of the man or woman being made to demonstrate topping up a faintly useless inflatable vest. And most of us even manage to refrain from the obvious fellatio-jokes as the blowing is in play. But, the actuality is that if we’re going down, we’re really going down, and that is not a blow joke.
Flying creates a state, subconscious or indeed very conscious, of heightened awareness. And in this state there lies a fascinating laboratory of basic human behaviour. On terra firma it takes a bucket of serious alcohol, or other drugs of choice, to make most people even begin to consider having sex in a tiny, confined, smelly, and indubitably germ-ridden bathroom, particularly one with a foldy door that can be opened from the outside ‘in an emergency’. In our day-to-day lives we would not laugh, and indeed cry to the weepy extent that we do, when watching pretty crappy films on screens that almost everyone would now consider embarrassingly low-tech. But we are in a mix of ‘fight or flightless flight’ mode and also, considering the end of life possibility, our genes are kicking hard to get passed onto the next generation. Those genes are not considering that anyone impregnated will be going down with the rest of us, flight having not been on the agenda at that evolutionary stage.
Flying is a strange middle place, neither the place we have just left, nor where we are going. This middle place is a suspension, an actual and physical waiting room. And while our primal setting is in threat-assessment mode, most of us are pretty exhausted, having pushed the limits ahead of travelling, to get everything sorted, if in work mode, or partied out, if on holiday. Preparing to fly taps into our need to have our ‘house in order’ or ‘everything tried’, just in case… We are hyper-sensitive, and so very vulnerable to self-medicating. Look at the junk most of us eat, drink, and watch on flights. I met a man who had found a way to watch hard core porn on flights, sort of without anyone else realising, thought his modus-getting-offus was actually the thrill of being caught, as against the content, but that’s a subject for another time.The point of all this is that who we are when we are flying is a very useful and tightly focused look into what we are missing when we are on the ground. Our fears, methods of distraction, and emotions displayed while flying tell us a lot about ourselves.
We can treat our boarding passes as a somewhat expensive form of introspective therapy, so see what you’re up to, next time you fly.