I've read a little bit about the life of Linda Greenlaw. She is the commercial fishing captain who survived the perfect storm and has written a book; Seaworthy: A Swordfish Captain Returns to the Sea. She offers this perspective: I had come to realize that life without challenge and passion is far more destructive than physical danger. When you are fully engaged,life is richer. That is what I am talking about. I didn't love flying because it is dangerous. The type flying I do isn't very dangerous - there are dangers, but the flying I do is not fraught with perils. Greenlaw says, "What I risk continually, what I fear most, is failure, which I define as passivity." I know precisely how that feels.
I was drowning in passivity. Somehow I had become almost a spectator of my life. I've never been a person who gets super excited about anything - I can and do act quickly instinctively, but without a lot of extras that may make it more interesting. I edit. Yesterday I was looking at frames (drat missed the sale - I can wait) and I saw a word I didn't know fillet - yes for fish, but for framing? A fillet (fill it) is a frame inside a frame or maybe even more ... I've seen them a lot. It's a decorative piece that borders a mat (or several mats). It's fancy. The frame shop guy said rich. Very pretty, very ornate. I strongly prefer simple. One sturdy frame one mat - natural colors - the colors I actually see at the coast. That's what I choose for myself and that is just how I am. I don't like the spot light. Some how in my life the my easy breezy live and let live evolved into whatever you think and in my desire to be a great wife I lost my me ... I would pop up just every once in awhile when anger made me bob in those murky, depressing waters. That was my fault. I accept responsibility for that. I watched my momma run my daddy and while I didn't know what kind of woman I wanted to be, I knew what kind of woman I didn't want to be.
My brother calls frequently - usually to make me laugh. Statistics confirm that men die before their wives, he told me recently. Yeah, that seems to be what I see, I told him ... wonder why? His immediate response was, "Because they want to." I laughed - he's always setting me up like that. He says it's an old joke. He said Momma didn't think it was funny.
I didn't want to be my momma kind of woman and that took me to just not knowing what to say in a situation where my husband had already made up his mind anyway. Seems like I like people who know what they think. You jump into that pool and quiet is seen as passive, complacent, consenting if not enthusiastic.
I have noticed that PIC skills call me back to who I want to be. I make decisions and I can see how they work out ... I can correct if I need to or just hold steady. I like that. As a ground school instructor I started out just covering the material with the class. I am learning how to instruct them (as individuals) towards being stronger students. Learning isn't passive. I see my own children having been taught to sit there and take notes ... regurgitate this information at the appropriate time and we'll call that learning. I can see now that even in the classroom learning can't be passive.
I believe that is exactly what life is - a classroom. We learn. Sometimes we get it quickly and move on to the next lesson. Sometimes we have miss-learned and relearning primary - foundational - stuff is really difficult. Especially the emotional stuff that is at our core. Working with the handfull of people who I love are the shapers of my experience - my lessons or where I learn. That is why I am so willing to work so hard with those few people. Love makes them matter. And once they matter - I don't let them go. (I am working on that new category called like - it's a come and go kinda place :)
I gotta go - I get to pick up my little one at camp today and I am also very happy about having friends in for dinner tonight. Last night I didn't sleep well, but I noticed I was thinking about the fly weights spinning on the prop gov. or the idea of the CG in it's place spinning like a gyro (Jake's thought - I'm thinking about that). I feel extremely blessed - extremely grateful - that I have the luxury of learning some of my life lessons in the aviation environment. It's good to be totally engaged - I'm not talking about flying, I'm talking about life.