Still Learning to Fly
There are songs that remind you of a moment. And then there are songs that quietly accompany you through entire decades of your life. For me, Tom Petty’s “Learning to Fly” has become one of those songs. The older I get, the more I realize the song was never really about escape or freedom in the simple sense I once imagined when I was younger. It is about movement. Survival. Reinvention. Continuing forward even when you are uncertain where the road is ultimately leading. “I’m learning to fly, but I ain’t got wings.” When I first heard that lyric years ago, it sounded hopeful and rebellious. Now it sounds human. Most of us move through life without really knowing what we are doing. We improvise. We recover. We lose things and keep going anyway. We leave behind entire chapters of ourselves in places we may never see again. For me, those places stretch across half a lifetime. And somewhere along the way, without fully realizing it, those places stopped feeling separate from one another. Th...
