I recently ran across John Steinbeck’s The Log From the Sea of Cortez. An article in the September issue of Smithsonian pointed me in the right direction and I’m glad it did.

Steinbeck marvels in the early part of the book on the boat master’s ability to stay on course and writes at length about the organic nature of steering on water. I’ve never spent much time on a boat, but I used to fly and I think I understand something of the adaptation we humans must make in alien environments. I believe it has to do with attention.

One of the tests a pilot must pass in order to received a license requires recovering from a stall. Basically you make your craft start falling out of the sky and then you recover from that fall—preferably before you hit the ground.

I couldn’t do it. I could recover all right. I just couldn’t make the plane stall. I’d pull the nose up until the plane was nearly vertical, but the instant I heard the change in engine pitch and felt that soft kind of flutter that signaled a stall, I dropped the nose and the stall never happened. Over and over, the examiner instructed me to stall the plane, but I couldn’t. So he stalled it for me. I recovered and got my license.

Some people would call that flying by the seat of my pants, but it wasn’t. It was responding to subtle but concrete sensory cues. What I’m getting at is that my awareness of the tiniest sounds and sensations made me safe in the sky. Like steering a boat or flying a plane, we humans can learn a great deal from attention to the sights and sounds, the smell and even the feel of the air around us.

Our planet is under siege and we with it. We need to experience and understand the nuances of what’s around us. We know about the conflagration in the Amazon and the floods in low-lying areas all over the world, but we need to know about our own neighborhoods. Our very lives depend upon it.