Product of My Choices

by Steve Messman

I have never been one to believe in fate, or chance, or predestination. I have never been one to believe that I have been chosen for a special path in life, or that any such path has been chosen for me by another, greater power. I do not believe that when I was conceived, my life was suddenly and neatly laid out from beginning to end in the Messman chapter of “The Great Book of Human Lives.” Maybe it would be better for me to say that I do not believe that fate has control over our lives. I choose to believe that, for the most part, each of us controls our own. We choose our paths and our destiny. We make choices along those paths that lead us to be successful or to fail miserably, that lead us to greatness or to misery, that lead us to the bliss of spirituality or to a living hell on earth. Please, don’t misunderstand. I do, actually, believe that fate brings significant change to our lives. I believe that momentous events over which we have no control crop up from time to time to shake the branches of our living tree. I believe that sometimes crap just happens, and sometimes that crap causes terrible changes in the paths over which we believe we have control. Everyday, someone gets seriously hurt in some unfortunate accident, and probably, most certainly, those people didn’t crawl out of bed with the intention of breaking a bone, or losing an eye, or even dying. At other times, the roll of the dice can be very beneficial. Someone will win a lottery, hit it big in a casino, or come into a large sum of money courtesy of “Reader’s Digest.” Certainly, these are acts of fate rather than choice. By and large, those kinds of events are not in control of our lives any more than we are in control of them. Those are merely happenings, a result of the unpredictable play of numbers, and yes, they most certainly can, and do, impact our choices. They might even provide us a sudden opportunity to change our chosen paths. For me, the choices we make daily are the tools that ultimately lead us to our deserved place in life.

You are probably asking what the heck all this talk about choices has to do with flying. The answer is—everything. Choices have everything to do with why we fly, how we fly, and what we fly. We sit on mountaintops or on beaches. We thermal with hawks, soar with seagulls, stare eagles in the eye. Our choices have brought us here. Our choices drive us up those mountains every weekend. Our choices lead us to yell “Clear!” and our choices permit us to raise our bodies into the turbulent currents of rising air one more time.

And, what of the choices that brought us to the mountaintop in the first place? What went into our choice to grab hold of our first wing in possible defiance of parents, friends, or significant others? What decisions were made before we contacted our first instructor? How difficult was our decision to lift our feet from the ground for the first time? For the second? To continue flying after our first crash? These are flying choices that we have all made at one time or another, and we continue to make them, probably on a near-daily basis. The combination of all those choices, and the ones that we will continue to make, lead us to where we are in our flying lives today, and they will take us to where we ultimately choose to be—unless crap happens, or unless the “Reader’s Digest” people knock on our door.

So it seems that most of life is a series of choices. Hopefully, wishfully, we will always choose correctly, like right now. My wing is in a rosette. I am choosing to wait for that perfect time. I am on my favorite mountain. From my perch in the back of my truck, I can see for miles, lots of them. I can see some forty miles to the Pacific, in fact, and watch the sun reflect off its mirrored surface. I can watch the clouds play over the valley. I can watch the ravens and the hawks play in the breezes before I do, and I can watch the wind take invisible shape as it travels its natural path up the west-facing slope. Of all the places on earth, this place causes my heart to race and my emotions to thrill. Of all the choices in my life, this one comes close to being the best. Flying is the choice that brought me to the top of this special place. My favorite place in the world. The place where I choose to wait, watch, and learn. The place where I was born to be.