One of the things they teach you in flight school is how to get out of a stall. A stall is when the airplane is going up at a steep angle and lacks the airspeed required to maintain that angle, so it falls over, nose to one side, and begins a course of rapid descent toward the earth. This is not a good thing. It is a bad thing, and often the last thing a pilot ever does.
With this in mind, they like to teach you how to get out of a stall. It can be done, and with a little practice, it can be done well. And of course, in order to get out of a stall, you have to first get into a stall. So you cut back your power and slow down the airplane, having already checked the skies below you to make sure you won’t crash into another plane when you lose the inevitable five or six hundred feet. Once the airplane is going slowly, you pull the stick back and the airplane starts to climb. When you’re climbing good and steep, you shove the throttle in all the way, and you get full power, and then you really start to climb. But not for long. Because as you climb, your instructor, who is sitting in the right-hand seat, makes you keep pulling back on the stick, so your climb is getting steeper and steeper. Finally, you’re going too steep for the plane to hold up, it falls to one side, and you recover simply by pushing the stick back in and using your foot pedals to counter the direction of the spin you’ve entered. Very simple. Very smooth. And incredibly scary.
The recovery is simple. The hard part is waiting for the stall. You know it’s going to happen, but you don’t know when, or which wing will drop, and you’re climbing steeper and steeper until the sun explodes into your windshield and the whole airplane is hot and stuffy and the sunlight is so blinding you can’t see your instruments and you’re being pushed harder and harder back into your seat, still climbing, and you pull back on the stick, and pull back, and pull harder, and you’re really fighting with the plane now, trying to make it stall, which it doesn’t want to do, and the high-pitched horn of the stall alarm cuts through the roar of the engine, and you pull harder and harder until your arm starts to cramp up and now the horn is blaring in your ear until after what feels like a thousand years the stall suddenly comes and the universe drops out from underneath you and you’re pitched forward and you can see the earth rushing up towards you at a hundred miles an hour… and you know exactly what to do.
Here’s my point: On those days when life is bad and getting worse, it helps to remember that your situation will probably reach a critical point, a point at which things are so bad the solutions become clear. Everything becomes simple. Even if it’s painful and frightening, it’s still simple. A stall is like that. You’re up there in that little airplane, hurting, scared, blinded by the sun, pulling back, waiting. Stalls never take very long – only thirty or forty seconds. Likewise, whatever crisis you’re in, your moment of clarity will get here soon.
It doesn’t take a thousand it years – but it sure can feel that way.