I’ve never considered myself a particularly brave or daring person. There’s still moments when I’m downstairs in our basement, and as a thirty-eight year old man I still walk quickly run back to the stairs after I switch off the lights at night. I might have idolized the heroes in the action and war movies as a teen, but I could never identify with them. Their courage and willingness to risk for what they wanted always seemed like something unavailable in my own factory settings.
So, I’ve been pretty surprised to the reactions of folks around me when I share about our hot air balloon ride. And I think you’ll agree that going on a hot air balloon ride basically puts me in the ranks of Braveheart, or Frodo seeing the ring all the way to Mordor, or maybe even Tom Cruise’s stunts in any of the Mission Impossible movies. Wait, you don’t think those are the same? Ok, you might be right. But the number of people who have said, “I would never do that” has been surprising.
I don’t know the reasons for their resistance: maybe nerves about heights, maybe the uncertainty of being held aloft by only some hot air and what appears to be relatively thin fabric, and the lack of an exit strategy (other than freefall) if things go sideways on the trip. Maybe they just see it as an unnecessary risk.
And maybe they’re right. But for whatever reason (mostly that it was on my wife’s bucket list), I made it beyond those points of resistance and got in the basket. And it was great. The ride was smooth the sunset and landscape were beautiful, and I wasn’t worried about the heights the whole flight. Sure, there were pre-flight nerves, but once we were off the ground, they seemed to disappear just like the solid surface we slowly lifted away from.
Shifting
The thing about a balloon is you can’t direct it. Just like the helium filled balloon that escapes a young child’s grip and floats up toward the clouds, a hot air balloon is subject to the wind. And an experienced pilot can no more direct the wind than that young child.
On our flight, we were set to follow the same flight path this group always does. Take off from the first launch site and land at the third launch site, passing a couple mountain ridges along the way. But on our flight, the winds didn’t cooperate with this plan. The first half of the flight went according to schedule, we slowly floated toward the big, main ridge in the distance, enjoying the sunrise and 360 views.
And then, the wind shifted abruptly, pushing us back toward the launch site from which we departed. And there was nothing we (clearly me, but even the pilot) could do. We sailed right up to the ridge, but never made it over. The pilot worked with the winds, trying to gain altitude and find a different wind direction, descending altitude to try and do the same. But no winds would get us beyond the ridge that day.
Even on the trip back to our landing near where we had begun, he was constantly working the balloon up and down, trying to find the breeze that would direct us where he wanted to go.
We didn’t know any different. It was our only flight, so it just felt like how things were supposed to go, but both pilots couldn’t stop talking about how challenging the winds were once we had landed, and just how unusual that flight was.
And maybe things could have been different. Maybe we could’ve hung by the ridge working up and down hoping to catch a change of breeze that would shift us over, but end up caught in an eddy in the sky, mostly just staying in one spot. But for the pilot, there wasn’t any question, he knew enough to not mess with it and trusted his instincts to work with the wind instead of fighting them.
And maybe that’s the real courage of it all. To stop pressing to make something happen that goes against everything you can feel in any moment or season of life.
In recovery circles, people talk about the mythical third door of moderation. Surely you don’t need to quit altogether, maybe just drink on the weekends, or just when you’re out with friends, or in line with whatever other rule seems manageable for you. Even months and sometimes years into the journey of sobriety these thoughts can pop up. But they call it mythical for a reason. And trying to walk through it is like trying to get over that ridge on our flight, you just spin there, unable to acknowledge the problem and unable to imagine there’s more available for you in life. Once you can accept the winds for what they are and take a break from your thing (alcohol or otherwise) for a while, you slowly start to return to where you started, which is coming home to yourself. You start to see the place you left when you started drinking years ago from a new perspective and while there’s work to do, mostly the winds slowly bring you back, unearthing bits of you you’ve long forgotten.
But it’s not just in recovery. Maybe you (like me) have lived a life that you thought was taking you up and over the ridge, but once you got to the ridge you realized there wasn’t anything over there worth pushing for. But everyone on the ground and all those cars have seen you working that direction for so long. And also, there’s a bunch of other balloons in this scenario and they all seem to be heading toward the ridge and some of them even make it over. And while the wind (and your effort) carried you for a while, eventually both just give out and you start to see maybe that isn’t the direction you wanted to go after all. It’s unsettling to be in those churning winds, on the edge between pushing yourself to make stay on the pre-planned course and accepting that maybe your path is a different one.
And like so much of my writing, I don’t have the answers here, because I, too, feel like I’m in those churning winds right now. Wondering where the courage is. I used to think courage meant continuing to push over the ridge, fighting and scrapping to make it and try to enjoy the journey. And more and more I wonder if maybe that journey just isn’t the one for me and maybe courage is trusting the winds to take me where they will.
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Where do (or have) you felt stuck in the churning winds? What helped you shift, or what can you imagine might help you shift now?
Mythical moderation - so spot on. Thanks for writing.