Weblog
07/06/03 10:24 AM: Out of Control
When pilots first began flying fast jet airplanes in the 1940s, they ran into a bad problem. At very high speeds and altitudes, sometimes the aircraft would go into a tumble. Not a spin or a dive, but an end-over-end tumble. The pilots would frantically fight the controls attempting to recover, but everything they tried only made the tumble worse. Ground controllers would hear the pilots screaming “What do I do?” as their planes slammed into the desert floor.
When pilot Chuck Yeager got into one of these tumbles, it was so rough that he hit his head against the canopy of the airplane and it knocked him unconscious. By the time he came to, the plane had lost enough altitude that it was back in the normal, thick air that pilots are used to. The controls began to work again. He was able to recover, and survive.
It’s human instinct when things get bad or complicated, to try to do something, anything to make it better. We have this need to control the situation, or at least to feel like we are in control. Generally though, in those circumstances almost anything we do will just make things worse.
Against all logic and instinct, sometimes the best thing to do is to just let go of the controls. Just experience the moment without attempting to control it. It doesn’t mean you don’t care, or that you don’t want to do something. It simply means you care enough that you want to do the right thing, and not just anything.
I’ve been trying to take this story to heart, and to apply it to my own life when things get complicated, and I feel like there’s nothing I can do to make it better. It’s hard, though, to just step away from everything. But I need to remember it’s not because I don’t care, it’s the exact opposite. It’s because I do.
