In praise of flying crooked

A  recent chance meeting with my former English Literature teacher led to an exchange of accounts of our lives and careers over the decades since we last met.

Neither of us had followed or created neat career paths, but had flown here and there, staying for a moment or a while, buffeted by some things, in pursuit of others.  

He later sent me this 1931 poem Flying Crooked by Robert Graves, which I share here in case you’re under any misapprehension that flying straight is the one best way. There’s an art to flying crooked, and it’s all good.

The butterfly, the cabbage white, 
(His honest idiocy of flight) 
Will never now, it is too late, 
Master the art of flying straight, 
Yet has — who knows so well as I? — 
A just sense of how not to fly: 
He lurches here and here by guess 
And God and hope and hopelessness. 
Even the aerobatic swift 
Has not his flying-crooked gift.


© The owner

#careerredesign #flyingcrooked

Photo: Vincent van Zalinge on Unsplash