In times of uncertainty, always trust your instruments

While visiting the shore a few years ago, my husband and I sat on the beach and watched as the orange sky faded into drab blues and grays, the cloud cover forming a false horizon that was tilted at a slight angle over the ocean. Having spent the better part of two decades living with a pilot, I’ve been conditioned to notice such things.

“That’s a dangerous sky,” I said, tracing the line of clouds with my finger.

My husband nodded. “Always trust your instruments.”

It’s easy for pilots who are flying by sight alone to become disoriented in conditions like this, particularly as the daylight wanes. Without the help of their instruments, they are always in danger of following the wrong horizon line, banking ever so slightly until the airplane enters a graveyard spiral from which there is no recovery.

The last few years have often felt like this, like losing the horizon. One day you’re gliding along through smooth skies, thinking you’re straight and level, then suddenly your wingtip hits the ocean and you are torn apart and submerged. Some days it feels as though we have collectively hit the water and been set adrift, not waving — as the poet Stevie Smith once wrote — but drowning.

Trust your instruments. That old pilot wisdom seems instructive right now. But which instruments are supposed to be guiding us? Love, I suppose. And light where we can find it. Both can be so hard to find as the dark days of winter close in.

Sometimes I will watch my backyard birds and admire the effortlessness of their flight, envy the instincts that never seem to lead them astray. Even the starlings, in those vast murmurations that swell and contract across the fiery winter skies at dusk — even they never falter, never strike one another and fall to the earth. How do they do this?

In flocks that number into the thousands, starlings will look to seven of their closest neighbors to guide them through the uncertainty of flight while maintaining the cohesion of the group. A murmuration is both highly mathematical and profoundly intuitive, a space where science and spirit apparently (fail to) collide.

I trust that we are also part of a larger whole that we cannot see from within. I trust that every change of course, every ebb and flow across the darkening sky is something magical to see from afar. Above all, I trust my instruments, and those who fly closest to me, to keep me aligned with the true horizon, always steering me toward the light.

Joanna Manning lives in Tacoma. Find links to more of her work at www.jlmanning.com.