Fear of Flying Up In the Air: Connectedness and the Unbearable Light ness of Being Alone

When I was about ten years old I had a recurrent dream, which is to say I had it more than once. It was a dream about flying. I would be running along Bannockburn Drive, a long step hill, running along the sidewalk and flapping my arms like wings, and I could feel the air beneath my scrawny wings lift me firmly, and within moments, I was soaring above the tall trees which bordered the road.

As a ten year old, I had a fair number of anxieties and phobias, more than most ten year olds I suspect, and they did not do me a lot of good, but when I took flight on these occasions I was not afraid of crashing--in fact my only anxiety was someone might see me and I'd get into trouble and they'd point at me and talk about me.

But nobody ever did see me. I would just fly around above the trees and it was exhilatrating and joyful and wonderful, but I knew I could not risk staying up there and judiciously brought my most wonderful adventure to a close.

I kept telling myself, "You're going to wake up and think this didn't really happen. But believe it. It did happen. Don't let yourself talk you into believing it didn't, because it really did."

Then I'd wake up and tell myself it really hadn't happened.

Later, I saw men jump off cliffs in New Mexico and do hang gliding and I wanted to try it, but so far, I haven't, in part because if I broke my back doing it who would take care of my family? My kids were young then. Now, I'm back to thinking about it again.


I thought about all this recently thinking about Up In the Air which is a male fantasy about, among other things, freedom, adventure, breaking the surly bonds and the perfectly unencumbered sexual relationship, a relationship untethered, without bonds.

Billy Crystal once said something to effect a woman needs a reason to have sex; a man needs only a place to have sex.

In Up In the Air, Ryan Bingham lucks into a woman who is looking only for a place to have sex. She wants nothing more. He is, of course, delighted. He crashes only when he starts to value bonds more than freedom.

Oddly, this ideal relationship was described decades earlier by a woman, Erica Jung, in a book with another airport motiff: Fear of Flying .

What Ryan Bingham's woman calls, "An escape, " or "A parenthesis," Erica Jung calls a "Zipless fuck." But it's all the same thing. Sex without the ecumbrances. Just frolic. A one night stand, a roll in the hay.

It has to do with freedom, with joy. Like flying.


But it may be, like the dream of flying, illusory.

It's a case, maybe, of "I was so much older then. I'm younger than that now."

Of course, the message of Up In The Air is such freedom from bonds is, in the end, an empty thing.

As the end of life seems less distant, however, you begin to wonder. We each of us come into this life alone and we most certainly go out alone.

You can argue this is not true. We are delivered into the arms of our mothers, and embraced, if we are lucky, by the rest of the family. And every hospice pamphlet pictures a family gathered around the dying relative, comforting the dying and the living with each other's presence.

But I'm not so sure, having seen death often enough, the dying actually feel embraced. They seem to slip away, very alone, removed.

Which brings me back to that wonderful dream, of flying. I was always alone. Ryan Bingham asks his brother in law to think of the happiest moments in his life and he asks, "Were you alone?"

The answer is no. The happiest moments were always with other people.

Certainly, I would have answered that among the happiest moments in my life were moments which involved the presence of other people. Especially when those people were my sons, or in some cases teammates on a baseball team, or a swimming team or a wrestling team.

But then I think of flying alone.

And I think one time, after I saved a life during a long, lonely night in the hospital, working alone and not giving into fear or lto ack of confidence, but just pushing ahead and after I was relieved by the next shift, once the patient was out of danger, I walked out into the bright sunshine of a New York morning knowing I had just done something I could never have imagined myself capable of--when I was a teenager or even a college student, I could never have believed I would have been capable of doing what I had just done--and I knew I had reached a new level of existence in life. I had actually managed to surprise myself.

You can value both, of course, the solitary joy and the joy of connectedness.

Maybe you have to have both to really have life.