We’ve all heard that old phrase ‘When one door closes, another door opens’. In my case it was the door to a cockpit. Learning to fly helped me find a new path – and a new understanding of myself – in midlife.
Here’s what happened.
The bottom had fallen out of my world. A lifetime of working in the arts had evaporated and the landscape I knew so well had disappeared. I was facing what so many of you will also have experienced: The loss of work that defines you, a shaky marriage, an ailing parent and an empty nest. I felt completely invisible. People stared straight through me. I looked ahead into a life which was a void: dull, boring, dutiful.
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It’s difficult now to remember quite how terrifying that time was … and just how long it lasted. I could see no obvious solution to my situation. In anyone else’s terms, I had nothing to complain about. I was clothed and fed and lived in one of the world’s great cities. Inside, however, I felt I was being readied for the waiting room of eternity. I shuddered at the thought of becoming an older women who asked for no more excitement than finding a new bathroom detergent.
I knew it didn’t have to be like this. My mother had been an artist whose passion for life coursed through her, expressed with fierce exuberance in her painting, her love of her children and generous spirit to others. Now, sadly, she was only a faint shadow of that strong woman I loved.
There was only one thing on the horizon, and I had spent 25 years saying no to it.
What drew me to flying
My husband was an aviation enthusiast, who had taken up flying again after getting his pilot’s licence as a university student. He’d asked a friend to take me flying once long ago, and I could still recall the sense of nausea and dizziness I’d experienced then. That open door had DO NOT ENTER written all over it in my mind.
Still, it’s amazing what you do when you have nothing left to lose. One day I finally said yes to going up with my husband’s flying instructor – despite being rigid with terror – and my life was never the same again. There was something about this 3-D world of men and machines that both delighted and terrified me, but what really changed me was the view I got from on high.
One flight led to another and another. I kept going back for more. I was somewhat worried that I was encroaching on my husband’s territory. I couldn’t justify it at all, except for one big thing: I was having fun.
That’s not a word that featured much in my life at the time. How many of us have seen our sense of joy buried under piles of washing, mountains of dishes and countless dinners cooked?
I even toyed with the idea of writing a soap opera with the men I was meeting as a cast of characters. They were unlike anything my artsy background had ever met
This new experience felt wickedly indulgent and totally taboo.
I even toyed with the idea of writing a soap opera with the men I was meeting as a cast of characters. They were unlike anything my artsy background had ever met. And if I regarded them as strange creatures, they certainly did the same to me. I was an alien in their midst. They scoffed, teased, flirted, bantered, ridiculed and frequently ostracised me. Adapting to this unfamiliar environment is one of the themes in the book I wrote about learning to fly. Now I pass through that world almost effortlessly, with the benefit of my pilot wings.
I’m convinced that I decided to get those wings in part to simply disprove the assumption from others that I couldn’t. Statistics are on their side, with vanishingly small numbers of women in aviation. (A few basics like toilets at airfields would certainly help redress the balance!)
Learning to fly became life lessons
Learning to fly as a woman over 50 was one of the most challenging journeys of my life. I know now I didn’t make it easy for myself. I was my own biggest critic. I wrote down the enormity of the learning curve while it was still fresh and raw. Eventually I realised that I was not simply learning how to fly a plane but going through a syllabus of life lessons. I called my book: Find Your Wings and Fly: Life lessons from the cockpit.
The words I held close at the time – and still do – were confusion, curiosity and compassion. I learnt a lot about how I learn, which is a useful tool too. Do you read every book there is on the topic, or just fly (ahem) by the seat of your pants? (It’s interesting too how many motivational phrases come from the lexicon of aviation, such as ‘pushing the envelope’ … which I felt I was doing all the time.)
Flying was an antidote to my midlife doldrums
In “regular” life, we’re often taught to keep our eyes ahead and keep going. This midlife crunch-time often forces us from known territory, where we operate on autopilot, often not questioning or truly experiencing life around us. I discovered that only by following those tiny whispers, the stirring of excitement inside me, that I found where my new chapter would take me.
Routine can numb us to the core. In contrast, flying very literally demands all your senses. It made me feel alive. Flying is also totally immediate – you need to be utterly present to the moment, or frankly, there may not be another.
What I learned from flying
I have since learnt that being present is something we can all cultivate in our everyday lives and you don’t need a cockpit to tune into the moment. That includes tuning into emotions that aren’t necessarily positive.
Take confusion. It’s not easy to embrace confusion, but an essential part of navigating into your new life means accepting it. You may have had all the answers until now, but when the future seems unclear, we resist. Only by accepting we don’t necessarily know where we’re going can we actually make headway.
I now have 2 separate ratings on my pilot’s licence, and I fly 2 different aircraft from very different airfields, but every single flight offers a new challenge or insight. There are times when the challenge is simply the joy of feeling comfortable with the discomfort. Other times, the weather, or instruments, or flight plans pull me right back to basics. I have learnt mostly to enjoy, or at least accept, the process.
I qualified as a women’s coach to help women who were in my situation see the light at the end of the tunnel sooner than I did. None of them has taken up flying as yet, but they have all learnt that joy can be found in the smallest moments of life. You can find that too. Take a breath and look around.
If you learn to listen to yourself with loving kindness, you’ll find you know when you need to take a deep breath and open that throttle, and when not to. And you learn to celebrate every win, however small.
– Nushin Elahi
