Walking over a Tornado

Remember any of those things that happened to you as a teenager, but it took a while for it to click? To have a deeper lesson. Even though when it happened it was really cool in a different way?

My geography class was on a school trip the Lake District in northwestern England for a week. We hiked around the region, putting untold miles on our hiking boots roaming the countryside in small groups of students. If there were any adults with us I don’t remember them. Pretty sure we were set loose and told to be back at the hostel before dinner.

There was learning to be done. We had to document different geological features like ox-box rivers and drumlins. That I remember these terms almost four decades later is a testament to our instructors, Mr. Thomson and Mr. Hudson. But geography/geology is not the biggest lesson from that week .

On one of these days we were hiking up the side of a valley when I heard THE noise. Growing up an Air Force brat (my father was a career Air Force officer) I was very familiar with jet noise from military aircraft. The Lake District was frequented by British and American jets doing low-level training. During these flights the crews flew very fast and very low.

As I heard the roar I quickly turned around and barely glimpsed a blue and grey camouflaged British Tornado fighter bomber flash by us. We were high enough up the valley that it flew below us. Being a huge aviation fan/nerd, I knew these planes usually flew in at least pairs.

I turned back to where the first Tornado came and saw the second one banking into the valley, condensation flaring off of its wings. It was one of those experiences in which time slowed to a crawl, though the jet was probably doing close to four or five hundred miles per hour.

As the jet approached me and my friends I could see the crew in their cockpit, the navigator sitting behind the pilot. In the front seat the pilot was totally focused on not bouncing off the landscape. The navigator looked at us and waived up at us.

In an instant all that was left was thundering jet noise as the Tornado disappeared down the valley, following its leader. Then there was complete silence apart from the sound of a constant light-drizzle falling onto and around our party. It was a story we bragged on for days if not weeks.

How does it figure today? Or years later? Where was the plane in relation to me?

It was below me. Not sure how far. Close enough to see the crew, but far enough away we didn’t’ get knocked down by its passing. But it was below me.

I’m willing to wager the collection of people who have seen a plane scream by below them is a fairly small number. It clicked into place one day in the form of perspective. How do see the world? In what ways can prompt our minds and bodies to consider a problem from a different angle?

It’s easy to say one should think of something from a different perspective. Or from someone else’s perspective. But that is not an experience that is ours. Here’s a couple of suggestions to create your own mini- alternate perspective experiences:

1. Change the relative position of your problem to you. Find a position where you are physically higher than your problem (be a statement, an object of interest, or even a person). Observe and take notes for ten minutes. If you do this with other people do not discuss until the end of the ten minutes.
2. Write down the most unlikely solutions that are possible. Then discuss how they could work? Or how they could be part of a more broad solution.
3. Rewrite your problem statement as it’s inverse. So if something is broken and you're trying to fix it, write how it is working and you need to break it. A solution can come out of destruction (or an opposite action to what you actually want).
4. Include people who are have no exposure to your type of problem/industry (or very little). Have them explain the problem, then come up with ideas for how they might fix it. Set aside at least a half-day, maybe more, for this exercise.

Give one of these activities a shot. You might discover a spark that makes a big difference in how you look at things. It might not be as dramatic as feeling the power of a passing jet fighter, but it’s probably better for your hearing.