Flying

I love going fast.  In a car, boat, plane, doesn’t matter.  I especially love roller-coasters.  The forward momentum plus the looping and diving are as close as I can come to feeling like I’m flying.  And even more than going fast, I love feeling like I’m flying.  I’ve dreamt that I can fly for as long as I can remember.  I fly in just about every dream I have.  Flying when I’m dreaming is as normal as walking when I’m awake.  So, its only natural that I would try to find an analog to that feeling while I am awake.  Roller coasters will do for now, but I’d really love to go hand gliding.  Either that or take ride in one of those things that look like a go-cart with a big fan on the back and a parachute overhead.  That looks super fun, too.  “What about sky diving?” you may ask.  Well, that does not look anything like flying to me.  That looks like plummeting through the sky at skin ripping speeds with an uncomfortably high chance that the trip will end in a bone liquefying collision with the Earth.  Nuh, uh.  Flying means that you have the option of traveling upward as well as downward during any point in your trip.  The only option in sky diving is down, rapidly.  And that, to me, misses the whole point of flying.  I want to exist in another elevation.  To travel along the curvature of the Earth at a height that I wasn’t designed to travel.  I don’t even have to be that high.  To cruise just above the tree-tops, maybe reaching down and letting my hand brush across the leaves, that would be heaven.  I’ve read somewhere that some birds seem to fly for no other reason than just because they can.  Well, of course they do!  Land-locked animals do the same.  Horses, dogs, sheep, children, sometimes they all run for no reason but to go fast.  It makes you feel alive, doing something only for the pure joy it brings.  That’s probably what my dreams have been trying to tell me all these years.  I need to pursue a life full of simple joy.  A life with the wind in my hair.

About these ads