To Infinity and Beyond

For those who've asked me "Why are you obsessed with flying?"

When I was a little technologist of about four years old, living in Africa - Warri, Nigeria, West Africa, to be precise - I gazed at the sky with spindly legs, knobly knees and my thumb stuck firmly in my mouth. Apparently I did this a lot. So much so that the grownups would lament, "That child walks around with his head in the clouds".

"He's a dreamer." they all agreed.

Be that as it may, I clearly recall that I had not established a specific relationship with the sky at that point, other than to ponder at length how far away it was.

I posed the question to the grownups.

"The sky is infinitely far away", my parents explained.

"How far away is that?" I cajoled.

Contemplating infinity, or perhaps it was simply staring at the sky, gave me a headache but I couldn't stop until the fateful day that an aeroplane passed overhead.

"Is that aeroplane in the sky?" I asked.

"Yes it is", said the grownups.

"Is it infinitely far away?" I badgered.

"No it isn't", responded the big people.

That was it. In one fell swoop, the grownups had revealed themselves to be an unreliable source of information about the sky. And, I wanted to be up there. I wanted to be an aeroplane when I grew up. Who wouldn't?! (BTW, I can tell you now that the aeroplane in question was a DC3 about 4,000ft overhead)

"Don't you mean you want to be a pilot?" asked the big people.

"No - an aeroplane." Big people can be so intransigent.

The road to becoming an aeroplane is a rocky one. In particular, gazing skyward can be debilitating down here on earth - those rocks will trip you up.

"Look where you're going", advised the grownups, as they picked me up from one fall after the other. "The child's clumsy", they agreed. Nowadays the word they were looking for might have been "dyspraxic".

The child wasn't clumsy. He was maladjusted to his earth-bound shackles. An aeroplane trapped in a human body. The child whooshed around with arms swept back tripping over rocks and crashing into furniture. I still have the scars to prove that it's better to fly through the air than around the house.

I will admit that in the many intervening years I have accepted a compromise.

I no longer need to be an aeroplane. It has been sufficient to "have" an aeroplane - I just want to fly!

Sometimes friends raise a curious concern. "How much does it cost to learn to fly?" they ask.

"It depends," I say. "On whether it is all you ever wanted to do, in which case it costs a pittance - less than, say, a modest second-hand car. But, if it ISN'T your top priority, it's a lot of money".

Personally, there's nothing I'd rather be doing, and nowhere I'd rather be than up in the air.

Thanks for visiting.