Kite

Bear with me a second – I’m going to speak about kites. I can sense the fingers hovering, the eyes scanning for the next link, but I promise this is relevant to you.

I was working on my novel recently and struggling to find the right metaphor for a relationship, and for a specific character. Her name was Kate, and by mispronunciation, “Kite” in the voice of another character. That’s how I landed on the metaphor – writing works like that sometimes – and it was pretty dang lucky that I did. It’s a great metaphor for writing itself, actually, because learning to exploit the serendipitous is usually where the best insights come from.

The relationship in question was a young love. It was characterized by warmth and love, but hampered by a lack of experience in the face of diverging paths. The Kate character finds her career as a photographer taking off, while her boyfriend McGhee (of the eponymous McGhee in the Gloaming) struggled to find his own way. While she sailed on the wind of good luck, buoyed by self-actualization, he found himself covetous of her success. Meanwhile, poor Kate was rather oblivious to this dynamic and it all became writing on the wall. This is nearly literal in the story as she displaces his hung paintings for her own work. Yes, it was clever, but lucky for me, more than that.

It turns out the kite metaphor became useful again and again throughout the story. Later in his life, McGhee expresses the sensation, when he loses his connections to his home, of a kite with the string cut: that sudden slack feeling which he had unknowingly defined himself against for his life to that point. The lack of an anchor suddenly became apparent, and what had been a wordless suspicion suddenly became explicit. So how does this relate to you, you ask?

Good question. If you’re like me, that sensation sounds familiar. Perhaps it’s the death of a parent. Perhaps it’s the loss of a career, or a serious illness. Regardless which is the mechanism for this metaphysical anomie, your initial response to this circumstance is likely a sort of spiritual nausea. Your previous goals may seem pointless or unattainable. Your situation, which just yesterday was fine, feels like a rut. In short, you feel stuck, powerless and adrift.

Sometimes a good night’s sleep will push it away, but if the shock is deep enough, it won’t. There are about 15 seconds after awaking you feel good and ready for the day until that feeling descends again like a pall on your perspective. What to do?

Embrace it.

Sure, that’s easy to say, but hear me out. What’s really going on is that your “operational amniotic sac” has been punctured and your ambient swimming fluid comprised of your assumptions, experience, constraints and expectations has leaked away. For a little while you’ll be able to see the world without a host of filters in your way, and the glimpse you get from that brief window can be especially useful. It can help you error correct if you’re off course. It can help you turn around entirely if you’re in retreat but didn’t know it. It can help you recalibrate your expectations for yourself or others and let go of unproductive entrenched positions. In short, it’s a great opportunity for a reset, and that can feel pretty good. But what does this have to do with kites?

As much as the string provides an anchor for a kite, it’s the kite that miraculously climbs the wind, and you can do that, too. You’ll find another anchor, or realize you’re still anchored like you always were, only it’s a little different than you thought. Or you’ll discover you just don’t need an anchor and fly like a kite anyway. The point is, it’s always within ourselves to transcend our circumstances, whatever they might be. Like so many things, it’s frequently a matter of perspective.

So as you’re now thinking of a kite, tugging at the string, I’d ask you to flip that image around for yourself. Be the kite, not the kite flyer. Allow yourself to float on the breeze and feel its liberation. Peer out toward the horizon, which you can see with increasing clarity as you gain altitude. Enjoy that moment of elation and freedom from the details which box in your heart and mind and float in that sensation.

My character Kate got to experience the entire flight of her kite, from personal rise to lonely dips, but don't worry about her -- she did ok. It’s just a metaphor after all, and she was able to rise again.

And as for kites, man has been building them for more than 2,000 years as it turns out, and I think there’s a reason for that. In them we see ourselves and our aspirations, our constraints, too, but it is the pure delight we have when we imagine we are them that keeps us flying. In the end, we fly just because we believe we can.