When I was a kid my cousin Donna and I once tied super-hero capes around our necks and flew. Our first flight was across the drainage ditch. Our parents smiled at our amazing flight. Older kids laughed. They said we didn’t fly anywhere, we just jumped. We knew better. We felt the wind fill our capes. We felt ourselves suspended in midair. We felt the thrill of flight. We had no doubt. We flew.
True, we didn’t fly far. The drainage ditch was only about four feet across. None of our other flights got us much further. We kept trying. We were certain we’d get better with practice. Surely it was only a matter of technique.
Our childish flights of fancy were prompted by an inscrutable human longing to fly. if we could, we would all take to the skies. The longing Is nearly universal.
Where does this longing come from? It’s not completely explained by the practical advantages of flight. It’s something older, deeper, more mysterious. Humans want to fly; as far as I know, no ape, monkey, or baboon ever gave it a thought. Only humans imagine it perfectly normal to long for the sky.
Even before technology made mechanically assisted flight possible, we dreamed of flying. The idea of people flying about in the air has never been thought as strange as it should have been.
Mythology and magic account for some of our unreasonable thoughts of human flight, but where did the notions that gave flight to mythology and magic come from?
Is there is something embedded deep in the human psyche that makes us think we should be able to spread our wings and fly?
From Icarus, to the Wright brothers, to Elon Musk - the quest still fascinates.
Ironically, the successes of mechanical flight don’t quite satisfy the innate longing. What we really want is personal, non-mechanical flight. Our souls long to soar.
Our bodies resist.
Our bodies aren’t comfortable with the physical forces of being airborne.
First flight in a small plane surprises expectation.
We expect smooth gliding, instead we get bumps, shakes and sudden drops in air-pockets. Beyond the turbulence, there is the stress of disturbed equilibrium. Vomiting is common. All aircraft stock vomit-bags for the frequent occasion.
High speed flight produces stressful gravitation pressure called G-force. Our bodies are not made for fast turns in empty space. Fighter pilots wear speed-jeans to control blood pressure during high-speed maneuvers, but control is limited. Anything past 6-G results in blackout.
More people drop-out of flight-school than graduate.
It’s disappointing to our flights of fancy.
Longing for the impossible isn’t natural, yet, we long for all sorts of impossible things. We long for a world without the cruel realities that are natural to this world.
Some part of our nature does not accept these realities as natural. Children more so than hardened adults.
We long to fly beyond these troubles.
Why do we have such irrational longings?
I suspect the answer is super-natural. I think it comes from a dimly remembered place where super-natural possibilities are limitlessly possible – Heaven.
Those of secular persuasion will scoff.
The Godly will not.
William Wordsworth in his poem, Intimations of Glory wrote: “Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting”. . . ”We come from Heaven still trailing clouds of Glory”.
When we were children, my cousin Donna and I wanted to fly. We thought it possible. We thought we could do it. Were we still “trailing clouds of Glory”? Does some small part of that Glory remain in all of us until we return to Heaven?
Is that illusion, or is our dreary life on earth illusion?
Secularists have no doubt about which is which. Neither do the Godly.
We are made of Earthly dirt combined with Immortal soul. I think all our impossible ideas come from subconsciously remembered reality of a better place. I think we long to fly back to the Heavenly world we came from.
Maybe that’s just my adult flight of fancy.
Maybe it’s true.