I wrote the blog entry below about five years ago. It got lost in the matrix when I moved my website back in 2023. The question has come up a few times recently, so I thought I would repost it.
“Do you miss flying?”
I’ve gotten that question a lot since Spirit Mission came out.
The truth is I do. Every day.
What do I miss about flying? I miss the feeling of strapping on a powerful machine, for sure. The pure fun and adrenaline rush of doing something dangerous. No, not just that…I miss being good at doing something dangerous, with dozens of souls on board, depending on you to get it right so that they don’t get hurt. The seductive, hinting wind up of turbine engines that you know will be screaming at you later when you tell them what you want, “Higher.” “Faster.” “Do it.” I miss climbing down out of a cockpit in a flight suit, wearing ray bans…All that cheesy and cliché stuff I miss.
But the funny thing is that now, in my fifties, what I miss most about flying is all the stuff I hated about flying in my twenties.
The studying. The planning. The tedium.
In flight school, before we could even get in the helicopter, we had to recite detailed minutia about every aspect of the aircraft’s systems. Engines, transmissions, flight controls, hydraulics, avionics, weapons systems. Horsepower. Pounds per square inch. Fluid temperature limits. Fuel capacities. Emergency procedures. Then, once flying, you learned quickly that the freedom of the wild blue yonder wasn’t so wild or free. Airspace was divided up into this area and that. Each area had rules and requirements. Radio calls. Transponder settings. Airspeed limits. Altitude requirements. Times of operation.
Then, once I got into special operations, there was the planning. God. Hours and hours and hours of planning. In my last unit, we planned our asses off. Everything down to the gnat’s ass level of detail. Our standard was hitting your assigned time on target plus or minus thirty seconds. And that TOT might come eighteen hours after take-off, a thousand miles away, after two or three aerial refuel tracks.
Now? All of that? All the stuff that was so tedious? So hard to get right? Then so hard to get perfect and make permanent?
Yep. That’s exactly what I miss.
That’s what made it a worthy practice.
I realize now that the longing I feel these days is not for being a pilot. Not really…the longing is for the practice.
Being a pilot is a practice. Like law or yoga or medicine or anything worthwhile, it never ends. You can never know it all. You can never master it. Ever. Though you wouldn’t know that from the egos you encounter.
I won’t try to improve on how it was said in Hagakuri, when describing the progression of samurai swordsman, “There is one transcending level, and this is the most excellent of all. This person is aware of the endlessness of entering deeply into a certain way and never thinks of himself as having finished. He truly knows his own insufficiencies and never in his whole life thinks that he has succeeded. He has no thoughts of pride but with self-abasement knows the way to the end. It is said that Master Yagyu once remarked, ‘I do not know the way to defeat others, but the way to defeat myself.’ Throughout your life advance daily, becoming more skillful than yesterday, more skillful than today. This is never ending.”
But I was an idiot in my twenties. I hated feeling like a novice. I measured myself against others with more experience. I counted flight hours and landings and night vision goggle flights and aerial refuel tracks and anything else that could be quantified in a logbook and equated to progress, knowledge, or status. And I let the comic opera of Clinton’s “post-history” peacetime military obscure what I was really doing.
After I left the Army I went more than a decade without a real practice in my life.
I realize now that for years I missed that feeling of being a novice. Of being on the edge of a vast body of potential experience and knowledge in which my twenty, thirty, forty-year-at-best practice will be like drawing a cup of water from the ocean.
Thank god for writing.
I stumbled into it in my mid-forties and it has become my practice. A page a day.
For me, writing, like flying, takes study and planning. I’ve got a day job I like a lot and is pretty demanding. So, the writing must have a designated time, or it won’t happen. I write best in the early morning hours before work, though a lot of times I have to do it in the evening because of travel or meetings. That is not to say I don’t think about it all the time. I do. I think about it at weird times of the day most days. Sometimes all day. When a cool plot solve or phrasing hits me at work, I jot it down immediately. I’m always scared I will forget.
Then on the weekends, when I have a little more time to myself, I try to do more than a page. Particularly if I get momentum. I’ve learned when an idea or state of flow hits you have to go with it, even if you were about to go to bed or are in the middle of binging some Netflix. “Baby,” I’ll lean over and say to Anna. “I need to go upstairs and write.”
“Go get ‘em,” she’ll say.
Those kinds of moments don’t come very often for me, though. Maybe a couple of times a year. So, I try to just be consistent. My goal is a page a day of something. Maybe it’s the next novel I’m working on or something like this…a random blog entry. As long as it is something creative, it counts.
I remember that’s what the good pilots did. They constantly studied, constantly worked to improve their craft. You could tell when someone had done the work. You could tell when they were an excellent pilot.
I don’t think I’m a good enough writer yet to recognize excellence. As a pilot, I got to where I could. Every time. I’d study it. How did they grease that landing? See the ratio of airspeed to nose up attitude there? See how he set his clock before changing the multifunctional display? I’m gonna do that…
But, in writing, I’m not there yet. First of all, I don’t read enough. I feel pressed for time. All the time. And want to write when I get a window, so I generally end up reading in bed and falling asleep after a page and not remembering what I read. (I get a chuckle on Goodreads when I see all of the random phrases I have “highlighted” by falling asleep with my finger on my tablet screen) I believe what Stephen King said, if you don’t have time to read, you don’t have time or the tools to write.
So I need to work on that.
I also don’t have too many writer friends. I’ve got maybe two. It’s a problem.
In the Army, I was surrounded by pilots. We all walked around like douchebags, sizing each other up, peeing on each other’s leg, pushing each other, learning from each other, looking out for each other.
It’s not like that for me with writing. I don’t know how to find writer friends. Do writers even have friends?
For my fiftieth birthday, Anna got me tickets to Robert McKee’s Story seminar in New York City. After West Point to the Army to business school to the business world, this was the deepest immersion into a creative life I have experienced. Three days, morning till night with a bunch of other writer-types studying the craft of story. I loved it. (Best gift ever, baby.) The folks there were great. But I didn’t make any friends that lasted.
I’ll just keep trying to write a page a day. My daily minimum. The goal is to advance daily. To become more skillful than yesterday. More skillful than today. I expect it to be never ending.