Living Life in New Directions

In 1999, Bertrand Piccard and Brian Jones completed the first-ever nonstop balloon flight around the world. Maybe it takes flying in a balloon around the world to better understand what it takes to live life. I saw a video of Mr. Piccard at the July 2009 TED conference where he describes a metaphor between ballooning and life.

If we were to observe human behavior, it wouldn’t take long to notice that most of us work very hard to try to control life. We strive to move linearly in defined directions. But Mr. Piccard wants to remind us that life is more like ballooning than we realize. It seems the only way to actually steer a balloon is by understanding the atmosphere through which it is traveling. Earth’s atmosphere is comprised of several layers of wind flowing in different directions. To get to a destination 100 miles east, you don’t actually start flying your balloon in an easterly direction; instead you go up. In order to reach an intended direction in a balloon, you have to move vertically, not horizontally. It’s in changing altitudes that moves you into the jet stream that is headed toward your destination.

Mr. Piccard encourages us by saying, “Life is no longer one line going in one direction in one dimension.” Instead, life is made out of all the possible lines that go in all the possible directions in all the possible dimensions.

So how can you change altitude? Well, in a balloon one way to change altitude is to drop ballasts or weights. But how do you know what ballast to drop and what altitudes are flowing in the right directions? This is not always easy for the pilot in the balloon to know.  You need someone who is not in the balloon to provide assistance. Balloonists use weathermen. Mr. Piccard describes how early in their journey the weatherman asked them to fly at a low, slower-moving altitude. The two balloon pilots were frustrated with this recommendation because they only had so much fuel and didn’t think going so slowly would  allow them to make it to their destination.

They disregarded the weatherman’s advice and went higher where they found a jet stream that was moving at a much faster speed. Bertrand said he was feeling great pride in his piloting skills and called the weatherman to boast of their progress. He said the weatherman’s response was one he will remember his entire life: “If you fly too fast now, in a couple of hours you will be forced left and end up in the North Pole. You, the good pilot up there, do you want to go very fast in the wrong direction or slowly in the right direction?”

They listened to that weatherman and changed their altitude. As a result, 20 days after taking off  their 45,755 kilometer journey ended at the desired destination. Mr. Piccard said in a Popular Mechanics article that “all the journalists were saying it was the last possible adventure in the atmosphere,” but he’s off onto other atmospheric quests. His next goal is to fly around the world, nonstop, in a solar-powered aircraft. You can follow the progress of his adventures at the Solar Impulse site.

Mr. Piccard’s metaphor provides so many great questions for life. What destinations are you headed toward? What altitude is the best one to get you there? Who are the good weathermen that can help you know the best directions? What ballast (aka “baggage”) can you let go of? With this new year before us and Mr. Piccard’s advice under our belt, may we all soar to great new destinations in 2010!