Taking Flight

I see online that they think (again) they have found Amelia Earhart's final resting place. That may be interesting but to me it doesn't matter where she ended, but where she went. That she acted on her dream, she lived her dream, and even died in it. She found what she needed to do, and she did it. She flew, in body, soul, heart, and mind. I don't know if any human being could do more. Most of us do less.

I'm reminded of a column by a famous New York newsman of the day, written some years before her final flight:

The best things of mankind are as useless as Amelia Earhart’s adventure. They are the things that are undertaken not for some definite, measurable result, but because someone, not counting the costs or calculating the consequences, is moved by curiosity, the love of excellence, a point of honor, the compulsion to invent or to make or to understand. In such persons mankind overcomes the inertia which would keep it earthbound forever in its habitual ways. They have in them the free and useless energy with which alone men [and women] surpass themselves.

—Walter Lippman, New York Herald Tribune, July 8, 1937.

That, I think, also answers the question, how should we measure the value of good writing? The answer is, we shouldn't. From my reading of the lives of many well-known writers, and from my own far more limited experience, writing is something we do because we must. And because when we throw ourselves into our writing we touch on some inner wonder, thoughts, and dreams we did not know we had.

The value of writing is in the writing, that when done with heart we take flight, go somewhere no one has gone before.