ost people can't fly and never will. There are plenty of good reasons not to fly. Here are some bad reasons:

Airplanes are too damned expensive. Flying them is a self-indulgent sport for snotty rich people. Little airplanes are deathtraps.

(Actually, airplanes cost about the same to buy as cars, and are cheaper to rent than cars; snotty rich people are usually too self-centered to submit to the discipline of flight training; little airplanes are as safe as the people who fly them.)

Here are some good reasons not to fly:

Cheap or not, airplanes cost money and money is hard to come by. Willing or not to learn, many people can't find the time to learn to fly. Even with the time and money, some people can't see well enough or have some other infirmity that makes flying unwise or impossible. And the best reason of all, some people just don't enjoy the sensation of flight.

If you are one of the large majority of non-fliers, you may resent it when people like me talk (often at some length) about the joys of flying. You may get particularly prickly when I go on and on about the supposed insights and self-discoveries available to airmen.

You are perfectly right, of course. Flying is but one of the ways that make up the Way, the journey on which we are all embarked, and it is immodest of aviators to think we see more from our paltry few miles above the Earth.

So what if you can't fly? It doesn't matter. All great voyages are as much inward as outward bound, and it doesn't matter if we make them in an airplane, a schooner, or a city bus. The important thing is to extend ourselves outward into the world with as many of our senses as we can. We will return heaped with treasures if we do.

This can be a journey without motion, an idea with a nice Zen feel to it. "There is no frigate like a book, to take us lands away" said Emily Dickinson, and she was right. She stayed home; few have ever travelled so far. Thomas Carlyle heard his English countrymen talk of new, free America, and impatiently quoted his master Goethe: "America is here or nowhere!" He too was right.

So if I invite you to share my airborne journeys, I am not insisting that you actually leave the ground. I am asking you to take some serious risks, however.

The risks in actual flying are really rather slight. Even the most dangerous sports, properly done, are exercises in risk management, risk reduction. Watch a good mountaineer prepare his ropes and map his route. He is no wild dice-roller in a game with God.

The real risk we need to face, the real hazard we must brave, is already present long before we launch the airplane, climb the mountain, shoot the rapids—or paint the picture, plant the flower, or whatever mode of searching we embrace. The bear we're hunting is already within reach. He is waiting, neither fleeing nor hiding. We will find him when we are ready. First, we have to look in all the wrong places. If we learn to look attentively, we will learn, finally, to look inside.

And there's the bear, where he was all along. He was the shape at the edge of our dreams, the one we could feel at our back as we ran without gaining ground. He's our fear, the whiff of our death.

He's always been there and he'll be there forever. We can't make him be gone or make him a pet. But we can make a life that includes him, respects him, accepts him. And such a life includes, respects, embraces genuine risks.

Everything beautiful is dangerous. A baby's smile can break your heart. Turn away from risk and you must settle for sentimen- tality instead of passion. And for what? The bear is still there.

The risk is not the point; the beauty is the point. The only risk that counts is the last one, and not even a lifetime of creeping caution can avoid it.

So fly, or sail, or walk, or sing, or do whatever lovely, risky thing you love. Reach out to the perilous world in any way you can and take it in and turn it in your mind's hands and learn it. Your journey outward will steer you inward, steer you home.

© Paul J. Sampson