Going Solo

The reality of learning.

Image: Mickaboo..

I’m looking forward to the conversation with Alan this evening (link below). The last couple of weeks, living with his thirteen questions, has led me down routes I had not expected, and for which I’m grateful.

One of them concerns the cycles we go through from school into work, then from what we hope our work will be to its reality, and how we deal with that. From there to the point where the work system, as designed, no longer has a place for us and how we deal with that.

In earlier times, in more cohesive societies, we would have had rights of passage to guide us and get to grips not just with what we were about to embrace and the responsibilities it carried but also with what we were letting go. In indigenous cultures, transitions from child to warrior to elder and the duties and privileges that went with them. In our financialised societies today, that holistic understanding is replaced by quantifying the stages in money - what it costs to educate us, the return on that education in the workplace, and then the amount of money it takes to look after us when we are no longer financially productive.

It doesn’t feel much like progress, really.

Over fifty years ago, as a student pilot in the R.A.F. I took my first solo flight, with the considered briefing of “f**k off and don’t kill yourself - the paperwork is dreadful” ringing in my ears (it’s service humour). I’d had about twelve hours of dual flying with the instructor. It was a moment of memorable focus.

The reality, though, is that I’ve been going solo on something ever since. There has always been something new to get to grips with, and after a period of “dual”, there was always a point of making it “mine”; of “going solo”

Fifty-odd years after that initial moment of focus, it is no different. After three years under instruction, helped by books and generous souls, it is time to go solo and make my writing truly mine.

The nests we build, particularly in a culture of “more”, can be dangerously comfortable. The danger is that, at some point, we lose the ambition to fly.

Every time we leave the nest, it’s the same. Trepidation, excitement, determination, even as we know the nest will not protect us from change.

We’re all winging it all the time, and it’s good to practice.

It’s what life is for.

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This evening - Alan Moore on 13 Questions

Alan Moore, the originator of the questions I have been pondering these last couple of weeks, will join us on Zoom to consider our reactions, questions and thoughts on how we apply them to our own practices and businesses.

Open to Subscribers only. Limited to 18 participants. Not to be missed.