The Falling Is the Flying
How the little finch learnt to fly
“Come to the edge,” he said. “We can’t, we’re afraid,” they said. “Come to the edge,” he said. “We can’t, we’ll fall,” they said. “Come to the edge,” he said. And they came. And he pushed them. And they flew.
- Christopher Logue
I’ve had to learn to fly a few times.
It’s been different every time, but it always begins the same way. I outgrow the wings that brought me here. The ones that carried me for years stop carrying me. So I grow new ones, bigger, and strangely unfamiliar and I learn the whole thing again, from the beginning.
This is the story of those wings.
In the Beginning
The first time I remember, I was sixteen, in Pakistan.
I knew I couldn’t stay.
I couldn’t have told you why. It was less a thought than a pressure. It was the first time I knew something in my body before my mind caught up — and the first time I aimed everything I had at a single thing: leaving.
That focus carried me to Chicago two years later.
I don’t remember much about Chicago. The cold, mostly. Falling asleep over my books in the library more often than I’d care to admit. And the discovery that it is expensive to keep library books for two years.
Before I knew it, I had a job in New York.
The winds were kind. I flapped a little, but mostly the breeze carried me further than I had any right to expect.
Those years gave me two things I’ve never lost: that I could trust myself, and that I had real agency over my own life. They are the first things I’d want to pass to my children. Most days, I think they matter more than anything else I could teach them.
Eagles, Vultures and Hawks
In 1999, in New York, the wings I’d flown on since sixteen stopped holding me up. I grew new ones. But the harder lesson wasn’t the wings — it was the sky.
It turned out to be full of larger birds. Eagles, vultures, hawks.
A good eagle would show you where the warm air rose — the invisible columns you could climb without beating a wing. A bad one would just as happily make a meal of you.
I met my share of both.
You learn to watch the other birds. You have to. Most of what happens to you up there has less to do with how hard you flap than with which birds you are flying near.
The First Finch
Around then I found a small finch to fly with.
We made a little family, the two of us. I had never flown beside another bird before, and there was a real beauty in it — the strange relief of matching someone else’s wingbeat.
It didn’t last.
I was young, and I understood far less about the world than I believed I did. That was the lesson, and it was a plain one.
But it had done something to my heart. Made it larger. And strong birds need large hearts to fly high.
The Magnificent Bird
For years, I wondered if I was simply too fixed on flying.
It was all I had ever wanted to do. To soar. To be the magnificent bird in the sky — the one everyone on the ground stops to point at.
Maybe one day that could be me.
For a long time, that was all I thought about.
The Lightning Storm
In 2006, I got the chance to leave my nest. I took it.
It was lucky that I did. In 2008, that nest was struck by lightning and burned to the ground.
It was lucky for another reason, too. I had tried to leave once before, in 2004, and couldn’t — the wings simply weren’t strong enough yet. Two years can be the whole difference between falling and flying.
Leaving exposed me to far bigger birds than I had ever flown with. Some were astonishingly fast, astonishingly sharp. Watching them stretched my sense of what was possible.
The world, I began to understand, is a very big place.
Flying East
Then a new nest began to take shape on another continent, and I flew east toward it.
But the real story is how I got there.
It was 2006 I was still working in New York, and online dating was barely a thing. I had gone back to Pakistan to see my parents and I was hunched over a painfully slow computer, and I made a small profile on a minor website almost no one used. At that same moment, on the far side of an ocean, a golden finch — freshly divorced — was making hers.
Of all the websites, we chose the same one. Of all the moments to be on it, we chose that one. We had no friends in common, no cities, no places where our lives had ever crossed. Nothing should have brought us within sight of each other.
We spoke for weeks by email alone. Then for two years across oceans, until the same continent finally held us both.
That golden finch changed my life more completely than anyone, before or since. We still fly together, every day. Without that one obscure website, we would never have met.
Little Finches
One day, little finches were born.
I have never been so frightened in my life.
Though frightened isn’t quite the word. The closer words are protective. Responsible. And, beneath both, powerless — the particular powerlessness of holding something whose heartbeat suddenly matters more to you than your own.
For all my new wings, I felt like a little finch again myself.
Leaving the Big Nest
As the little finches grew, I began to understand that the nest in the East was no longer right for me.
Something was gnawing at me. Quietly. Constantly.
I couldn’t have named it if you had asked. But it didn’t stop.
In the end, I left that nest without a plan.
Searching
That took me out into a kind of nothingness.
Open sky in every direction. No land in sight, no thermals to climb, nothing on the horizon to aim for.
It may be where I have grown the most.
It was out there, with nothing holding me up and nowhere to go, that I found parts of myself I had never met. New friends. New ways to fly. New places worth flying toward.
And somewhere in all that emptiness over many years, I stopped being afraid.
That is where you find out who you really are. And who really loves you.
Inflections
It took me until my forties to understand myself with any clarity.
And once you understand yourself, you finally know where to go, and what you are uniquely built to do.
The question that unlocked it for me is one I’d offer to anyone: what looks and feels like play to you, but is hard for everyone else?
Hunter S. Thompson put it more forcefully, in a letter he wrote at twenty-two:
“A man must choose a path which will let his abilities function at maximum efficiency toward the gratification of his desires... he has not dedicated his life to reaching a pre-defined goal, but has rather chosen a way of life he knows he will enjoy.”
He hadn’t fixed on a destination. He had chosen a way of flying.
Some Lessons
A few things the wings have taught me.
Growth requires leaving the nest. No one flies without taking the leap first.
You have more agency over your life than you think. Trust yourself.
Much of what happens is luck. The only real question is what you can do to make luck more likely to find you.
Be helpful, useful, generous. The universe keeps a longer memory than people do.
Be curious, and be interesting. The universe rewards play.
Be gentle with yourself. The universe was never trying to make you suffer.
A great life cannot be planned. But it can be prepared for.
The New Search
So now it is time for the new search.
Sometimes you are thrown out of the nest before you are ready.
And sometimes you have to throw yourself out. Because you know, with a certainty you can’t explain, that staying is the one thing that will keep you from growing.
W.H. Murray wrote the lines I keep coming back to: that the moment you truly commit, Providence moves too, and a stream of help arrives that would never have come otherwise. Begin it now, he said.
So here I am, at the edge again.
Older. A little more afraid, if anything because now I know exactly what the falling feels like.
But I know the secret the young bird never did: the falling is the flying. There was never any other way to do it.
The wings I have now won’t be the wings I’ll need. They never are. I will grow new ones, and learn the whole thing again, from the beginning.
“Come to the edge,” the man said.
This time, I’m not going to wait to be pushed.
P.S. I had this song on repeat as I wrote this, so it’s an important part of this essay.