Born To Fly

Hopeful  8     Hopeless 2

I was thinking about this song by Sara Evans after my date with Amin.  I had never quite understood it properly, I realized.  "How can you keep your feet on the ground when you know you were born to fly?" the song asks.  I thought it was about accomplishing great things in life (flying) and also talked about that feeling of being stuck or weighed down by life's obstacles (feet on the ground).

The rest of the song is clearly about romance.  I had just not understood the full message before.  To be in love is to fly.  Certainly I felt like I was at the very least floating the entire weekend.  The hopeful-hopeless count reflects how I was feeling on that Friday night.  When I got home, I was positively bursting.  I wanted to gush about the date to anyone who would listen to me.  I was so charged.  It turns out that my Dad was still up, so since I didn't want to talk about it in front of him, I didn't get to tell my mother and sister right away.  I rushed to my computer and found Stella online.  I was so glad she was there and began typing more or less coherently about the highlights of the date.  I babbled about banana bread and holding hands ("I haven't held a guy's hand in 7 years!").  She said things like: "that's so sweet" and "sounds like a very nice date".  It was.  It was so nice, I thought I would never be able to sleep.

The next day, I caught myself smiling a lot.  I was trying to do my school work, but I was distracted.  It was a bit like dreaming.  Scenes of Friday night replayed themselves in my mind.  I had a pervasive good feeling that lasted through Sunday.  I kept trying to come down and finding it a challenge.  In one of those e-mails we had exchanged during the week before our date, Amin had said something about the second meeting as "seeing if there is a spark", but importantly that this should be accomplished "with a clear head".  My head was definitely not clear; it was in the clouds. 

So, I found myself at last faced with the question from the song: How could I keep my feet on the ground?  I wondered how I possibly could, when I knew I could fly.  How could I remain objective and fair?  Amin and I were once again on the same page about this: we wanted our feet firmly on the ground, so I tried not to be swayed by or entirely swept away by the blissful feeling of flight.  With difficulty, I managed to come back down because the desire to be cautious and sensible was stronger.  It was my personality and the choices I wanted for myself that won against my emotions.  You could no longer call me unbiased, but I was still making my best effort to remain objective.  The harsh reality of a Monday morning is always sobering; this is what truly helped me to come back to myself and be grounded again.