Needing a challenge in my life one year, I decided to learn to fly. This amplified five qualities that have singular meaning to me now; persistence, assertiveness, detachment, focus, and confidence. Learning to fly has had a special influence on my life, and on my development as an artist.
The first thing that happens in training to fly is practicing take-offs and landings. It is of course, the most important aspect of flying. If you can’t get the plane back on the ground in one piece, you only take-off once. Persistence is key in this phase of instruction; stay on task, keep practicing, learn from mistakes, do the repetitions. As an artist, I have learned that some pieces demand an attitude of persistence. Not all paintings reveal the right direction to go at first, solutions aren’t always obvious until they’ve been worked at it for a while.
Preventing stalls is the second skill I learned in training. A stall is when the airplane loses lift and flies like a rock - which means it doesn‘t fly at all. Practicing the prevention of stalls means purposely putting the airplane into a stall, and then correcting it. During this time the instructor showed me what a spin feels like (it is an aerobatic maneuver), because if you don’t you don’t do a stall recovery right, it can become a spin, and a spin is a lot harder to recover from. Assertiveness came to mind in this phase. In general, when flying it’s dangerous to be wishy-washy, you have to fly the plane, not let it fly you. Making the right corrections firmly in stall or spin recovery is essential, because, after all, it is a matter of life or death. So too, when creating I must not let the medium control the show, although it’s not really a matter of life or death.
In the next phase of my training I began to chafe a little under what I saw as a nasty attitude from my instructor. He would put me in difficult situations without notice and get upset when I reacted badly. We practiced things like emergency landing procedure and partial failure of different systems. His attitude didn’t make any sense to me at first, until I realized he was only putting me under pressure to better handle tough situations when they came along. I did very much want to continue flying, and the solution to this problem is the third quality in my list; detachment, try to detach my feelings from the instruction. This was not easy for me because, all my life I’ve been known as, “the sensitive artist”. It was, however, a crucial lesson for me to understand; there are times I cannot afford to let feelings get in the way. My major example of dealing with feelings as an artist, is having my work criticized. It is easy sometimes, to get so emotionally involved in my work that it’s nearly impossible to objectively consider any criticism, whether positive, or negative. Flying helped me look at this in a different way, because feelings must not get in the way when clear, firm actions are needed to stay alive.
By this time in my training I was ready to fly solo, or so my instructor thought and although I wasn’t sure about being ready, things turned out very well. My first solo is still one of the most memorable events in my life. It went very well, smooth air, soft landing, I can still see it in my mind. Getting to that point, I came to understand the place of focus in my life. This wasn’t like my first time driving a car alone, this was flying solo in an airplane, not a computer simulation, the real thing! If doing the right things, staying alive, and bringing the plane down safely doesn’t motivate concentration, I don’t know what would. When I talk of focus, it doesn’t mean to block everything else out. There is too much going on that needs attention when landing an airplane, tunnel vision can get you in trouble. So, here, focus means not to block out, but to zero in, it means to know what to attend to when. This type of focus has a very good application when working on a piece of art with a complex composition.
After my successful solo flight, I had the privilege of going out to practice on my own. I couldn’t take any passengers (I sure wouldn’t fly with me at this time), but I had fun practicing maneuvers, and doing touch and goes (landings and take-offs). Now I entered a new stage in my flying education. It was time for me to have confidence in what I had learned, to trust and apply. At last I was able to relax a little and enjoy the scenery and revel in my new found skills.
The last stage in flight training includes three solo cross-country flights. To be safe and successful, it is important to have confidence, to act with confidence, and to be firm in decision making. Solo cross-country flights can be real adventures. I was on my own, to figure my routes, to navigate to other airports, and to keep track of changes in the weather. I had to take charge of the situation, be confident but not arrogant. There is a saying among pilots; “ There are old pilots, and bold pilots, but there are no old, bold pilots.” Confidence needs to be connected to a realistic assessment of ability and talent. To an artist, confidence is the same, acknowledging talent and ability when and where it occurs, then using it effectively.
At the completion of these cross country flights, I was ready to take my check ride, the test that would give me my pilot’s license. Although I had some trepidation, I passed the test without any major difficulties. All five qualities mentioned above came into play; persistence, assertiveness, detachment, focus, and confidence. By the end of my training, I had a new perspective on life, the experience reinforced some important qualities for me as an artist, and I gained a deep feeling of accomplishment, that has been hard to reproduce.
