Pilot vs. Navigator

Screeching whistles ended with concussive sounds, as bombs laid waste to European Axis targets. Hundreds of tons of payload were entrusted to US bombers to release screaming metal hail to transform building and landscape to charred ground. Enemy logistical lines, critical infrastructure, and sensitive military targets obliterated under succesful bombing. It took two important things – an enduring Pilot, and a dedicated navigating crew-member.

Although we live a lifetime away from that war, a daily one exists for all those who attempt to live noble lives. Our targets are many: anxieties, uncertainties, failures, false expectations, and other seeming challenging realities. Unless we fly into their midst, and lay waste to the true causes of inner difficulties of life that attempt to dislodge us, we may find ourselves against increasingly growing difficulties that can overwhelm us with time. Unchecked darkness in us tends to grow into overwhelmingly destructive patterns of thought and behavior.

The Navigator in us scans the skies of conflict our lives, reads maps of proven principles and virtues, and calculates outcomes and efficient means to locate the places that need confrontation or obliteration. A person may need to locate the basis for their unhealthy obsession with professional success, for example,  and must navigate their way to the root of the affection, in order to then see what must be done about it. If they do not, it will demand of them the sacrifice of things of higher order – like faith, and family, to maximize feelings of euphoric success. For the virtue-less, or those with weak principles, the Navigator in them sends them in endless misdirection, almost never arriving at the correct conclusions to reach the cause of the difficulty.

Our self-confidence, or at the very least faith in ourselves (because of a present God) despite onset of terror, is that which keeps our hands on the yoke, steering ourselves into threatening territory, as our inner engine roars and propels us in forward motion. The Pilot needs strength of relative certainty, self-esteem, and self-assurance, and reads those gauges as he flies on. Without these things, the Pilot fails to send us forward, keeping us stuck on the runway, or too slow to reach the target in time, costing us valuable time, and minimizing the speed of conflict resolution and personal development.

It is when you see sincere but confused planes (people) flying (living) in ways that make no sense that you determine a terrible reality.

In a great many of these planes, only the Pilot or Navigator exists; that the one has murdered the other, and now they do not fly as they ought.

When “getting things right” and micromanagement of oneself demands such severe hesitation as to render one immobile, then then Navigator has killed the Pilot. Self-doubt rules with an alibi of piety. The person ruled by their Navigator fails to act, even when righteousness demands they do – and they justify it using God as an excuse.

When “forward motion” matters most, concern for making mistakes is terribly de-prioritized. Reaching a future goal matters more than the potential for destruction that is made in reaching it. The Pilot has killed the Navigator.  The person ruled by their Pilot fails to empathize, as their confidence reaches heights of blind arrogance. If things or people are indirectly (and sometimes directly) damaged as a consequence of pursuit of personal ambition, those things are ignored, usually without a single conscious consideration. And if it is brought to their attention, it is their “righteous” crusade which justifies “necessary” sacrifices.

Nurture them both and let them argue with each other. Navigate and Pilot. Let “getting things right” be tempered with prevalent self-confidence and vice-versa. Sometimes the Pilot must insist on pushing boundaries in life, to which the Navigator must bow. Conversely, the Navigator may argue to pull back on the throttle, and to recheck the plane’s gauges, because time is needed to investigate the best means of action, before possibly steering them both into directions that may not be safe. Pilots and Navigators are a married necessity. To have it any other way, is to allow the machinations of destruction to take hold, and to enable confusions, depression, discouragements, anxieties, and other forms of emotional/spiritual challenges to prosper.

Provide your email below for updates on new posts