Steering by altitude
‘Tis the season for shockingly awful Netflix Christmas films. We watch them anyway: the so-bad-it's-good genre of Lindsay Lohan's latest and shameless titles like Twas the Text Before Christmas (can't bring myself to watch that).
Recently, I watched Best. Christmas. Ever. which strangely features a hot air balloon. I feel like at this point they (they: the big Netflix gods) are clutching at straws to have a point of difference and, well, I guess the hot air balloon idea won out that year.
I don't know how you feel about hot air balloons. I think they can be a really beautiful spectacle in the sky, but the idea of dangling in a wicker basket and floating away is kind of terrifying.
As we sat and half-watched this film, my brother-in-law Googled whether you can steer hot air balloons. Do you just end up in a random field somewhere or can you go back to where you started?
Okay, so here's the answer to why I decided to ramble at you about hot air balloons on a Friday morning in December (as if in some lesser version of Ian McEwan's Enduring Love): it's called “steering by altitude” and I thought it was a lovely metaphor for getting through life.
You see, in a hot air balloon, “steering by altitude” means you change direction from different heights. The steering of a hot air balloon requires reaching different wind currents at different heights, so the pilot will use more or less hot air to go up and down to reach different wind speeds and directions.
It occurred to me, then, that perhaps, like hot air balloons, maybe we can only change direction in life from different altitudes. What if we can only know where we're going by moving up and down? What if we have to wait for the wind to change?
I found solace in the thought because I've had a difficult few months, with flares of low mood and anxiety, and the idea that perhaps I just needed to reach a different level before I could change direction helped me to understand it. If we're trying to change direction, but we're not working with the currents, then we'll struggle to move. It felt like sighing to know that perhaps it just wasn't my time to move, and I just needed to wait either for the wind to change direction, or for the things I was doing to get me through to bump me up a level.
Try as we might, we can't control the weather. We study our weather apps religiously and talk about it all the time! We feel pleased about predicted sunshine, excited about expected snow or downtrodden by impending rain. In recent months, I've taken to not looking at my weather app (apart from for holidays) because I'd rather be pleasantly surprised. The gamble of expecting sun and getting rain was too much for me.
Sometimes we get our predictions right and sometimes (or regularly, it seems) we don't. We can't control the wind coming in from across the ocean, but we can choose to accept it, work with it and know that it will pass.
Mindful moment: Perhaps the current altitude you are sitting at is not allowing you to change direction. There are things we can do to move up and down in our own lives, through the choices we make and the values we seek to follow. But when the winds are strong, sometimes we have to accept them and follow them until we are resourced enough to begin to move to a different altitude. There is only so much prediction and “control” we can exert on the weather systems of our minds. We do what we can to steer through storms. I hate to bring this up, but perhaps now we can understand that “Life isn't about waiting for the storm to pass, but learning to dance in the rain”. Sorry to Live Laugh Love you on a Friday morning, but I'm a sucker for a cheesy quote and this one seemed pretty apt. This too shall pass.