Writing Experiment: Let your words take flight

A playful technique for letting go of unhelpful things or launching a long-held dream.

Dear Writing friends,

Last weekend, I was due to fly off to another place. It was to be my very first solo international research trip - and by far the furthest I’ve travelled alone since my daughter was born, more than eleven years ago.

I was full of excitement.

However, as you now know, life had other plans for me.

These past few days, I’ve been thinking about flight. In our everyday language, we often use the idea of flying and flight as metaphor: time flies; she’s a high-flier. We are hard wired to the primal experience of fight or flight. To fly can mean to escape, to take flight from something; and it can also mean that we find our freedom, take off, launch something upon the air, soar through open spaces.

Perhaps it’s no accident that the idea of soaring high, that heady exhilarated feeling of success or fulfilment, also carries inside it the possibility of risk. To speak of flying is to know that we can also fall. After all, we are embodied creatures and metaphor is one way that our bodily feelings find their way into language.

Thinking about all of this and my own (temporarily) thwarted flight, I came up with a Writing Experiment that I hope you’ll find fun.