Soaring Above the Crowd

"The higher we soar the smaller we appear to those who cannot fly."

-- Friedrich Nietzsche

Most people's lives are pitiful. Humdrum, boring, caught up in the day-to-day. They (we) move through life as if our feet were bound in cement shoes and our wings nowhere to be found. When someone breaks free of this earth-bound existence and begins to soar, we say "they're really out there." They're different, weird, somewhat threatening to all of us who have chosen the seemingly safe routines of so-called normal life. And the higher they fly, the harder it is for us ground dwellers to see what the hell they're up to. 

It's our loss. Every time we write off another's flight as mad, irrelevant or childish, we have reduced our own likelihood of ever flying. We need to respect the pioneers of soul flight just as much as we respect Orville & Wilbur, the Apollo astronauts, and the other pioneers of  physical flight. Only by giving others their due can ever hope to come into our own.

You see, the capacity for flight is within each and every one of us. The ability and desire lie dormant in even the earthiest of souls. By supporting and praising the flights of others, we are also increasing the likelihood that we, too, will one day take to the air. 

And really, isn't flying, soaring what it's all about? At the height of flight the petty melodramas that consume us on a regular basis are seen as the small, inconsequential things they truly are. But even more important is the experience of flight itself, the weightless and effortless rising on the updrafts of energy that lift those who are wild and free enough to spread their wings and toss themselves into the abyss. The moment of flight, that peak experience, is worth so much more than the slow-moving hours, months, and years of drudgery that we now call life.

Now is the perfect time to enroll in flight school. Any true spiritual path will do, be it well established or idiosyncratically your own. You will need to leave the classroom soon enough anyway. Soaring cannot be accomplished within the confines of the known. Into the great wide open, wings spread, hearts on fire, let's join Nietzsche and fly!