Podcast: How You Change, When You Learn Something New.

“I saw an interview with Harrison Ford, who learned to fly when he was 50. He said, ‘I hadn't learned anything in a long time.’” For Patrick Chovanec, novice pilot at age 50, that rang a bell.

Patrick Chovanec, author of Cleared for the Option, with his trusty training plane. Most people who know how to fly have spent long hours in Cessna 172s like this, or similar planes. Until we bought one of the first Cirrus SR20’s off the assembly line in Duluth in 2000, all of my training and flying had been in rented Cessnas—152s, 172s, 182s—or the occasional Piper Cherokee. (Photo courtesy of Patrick Chovanec.)

Flying has often led to good writing. If I start listing examples, I’ll feel bad for the ones I leave out. But I can’t go wrong by mentioning again the one that has stayed with me most, Fate is the Hunter, by Ernest K. Gann.

This week I talked with the author of another worthy entrant in the “good books about flying” category. The book is Cleared for the Option: A Year Learning to Fly, and the author is Patrick Chovanec, whom I first met when we were both living in China more than 15 years ago.

You can listen to our conversation, and hear the enthusiasm, passion, and humor in Patrick’s voice, by clicking the player below. I’ll give a little more background below that.

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By trade Patrick Chovanec is an economic analyst and CPA. But during the Pandemic Years, which coincided with his turning 50, he decided it was time to learn something new. Over the course of a year, at a small airport in New Jersey, he went through ground school, written exams, medical exams, flight training, “first solo,” “solo cross-country,” night-flight training, and ultimately the successful check-ride that gave him his Private Pilot certificate.

He tells that story in Cleared for the Option: A Year Learning to Fly, a book I greatly enjoyed. (And did a blurb for.)

The title phrase is one of many terms-of-art in aviation. Sometimes in training you want to do a “touch and go,” bringing the plane onto the runway and immediately pushing in the gas to take off again. If the runway is long enough, you can do a “stop and go,” in which you land, brake the plane to a halt on the runway, and then take off for another circuit. I don’t like either procedure, because they involve rush (which you try to avoid in aviation) and can build bad habits. But in training these shortcuts let you get in more practice landings in a given time.

When a tower controller says you are “cleared for the option,” rather than the normal “cleared for landing”, it means that possibilities are in your hands. You can touch and go. You can stop and go. You can do a normal “full stop landing,” and then taxi off the runway. You can do a "low approach,” where you fly almost down to the runway and then put in the power and climb away. The runway is available for whichever you choose.

In the book Patrick explains the technical connotations of the phrase. But he also means it as a metaphor. Learning an entirely new skill meant he was “cleared for the option” in life more generally.

That’s what he discusses in our talk. Here are two samples from it:

I start with the obvious question: Why? Patrick Chovanec had a demanding “normal” job and a young family. He wasn’t in his first youth. Why go to this effort and risk? He said:

I saw an interview with Harrison Ford recently. He actually learned to fly when he was about 50, just like me. And he put it in terms that I had always been sort of thinking in the back of my mind, but he said it explicitly.

He said, “I had gotten to a certain age in my life where I wasn't learning. I hadn't learned anything for a long time. And I wanted to see whether I could learn something new.”

Learning something new, I think we shift at some point in our lives from when we're in our 20s, and everything's new and we're sort of figuring out things, and everything's a new adventure, and we're developing skills. Then by the time we're 50 or so, we assume that all the skills worth having we already have. And that the ones that we don't have probably aren't worth it.

And the things we can do, we kind of assume: Why can't everybody else do the same things I can? They must be slow.

And learning something new—especially sitting next to somebody who's probably much younger than you and can do all these things you can’t—it's a humbling experience. It makes you appreciate the range of skills that people have, the skills other people have that you don't, and the discipline that it took to master them.

Also on the subject of learning, which is in the book’s subtitle and is its recurring theme, Patrick Chovanec discusses learning to land the plane at the small airport where he did his training. The runway at that airport is narrow, and very short. (For aviators: this is Lincoln Park NJ, N07, where the only runway, 1-19, is 40 feet wide and 2767 feet long. But because of a large displaced threshold, the usable landing distance for Rwy 1 is less than 2100 feet. Short.)

Patrick said, about his first landings at Lincoln Park:

It looks like you're coming in at a sidewalk, right? You’re trying to land on a sidewalk at 65 miles an hour.

I think your brain has to become used to processing that. And one of the things that I found helpful was that my daughter was learning how to play baseball at the same time, and I was throwing a ball to her.

And I realized how as a kid, somehow I just learned how to anticipate where the baseball's gonna come when somebody throws it at you. You just put your glove up and get it. You're tempted to say you do this ‘without thinking,’ but it's actually, your brain has learned to think, has learned to see in a way that it might not have before.

And I could gradually see her picking that up, and I took some encouragement from that. I thought, if she can learn how to see where the baseball is going, I can learn how to process this new experience if I just keep at it.

There’s a lot more in our discussion, and of course much more in the book. I recommend it to aviators, normal people, and anyone interested in the marvel of continued exploration and growth.

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From New Jersey to Florida, from the 50s to the 100s.

Household news: Deb is on an extended stay in Florida with her mother, Angela Zerad. I’ve written about Angie several times, including when she turned 100 in 2021, and when she turned 102 two months ago.

Angie is a lifelong musician, and until just before New Year’s Eve, she had been giving hour-long piano recitals every day at her assisted-living facility in Venice, Florida. Then, two weeks ago today, she had a minor stroke. This is a consequential event for anyone but especially for a pianist, and especially at 102.

Last night Deb sent this video of Angie trying to re-master the skills that had been essential parts of her life. Deb says, of her performance just days into her recovery:

One of Angie's best therapies is "re-learning" the piano , which she has been playing for 95 years. She has mastered an impressive repertoire of music over the decades. Now, when Angie plays songs she knows by heart, the muscle memory is intact, and she sails through a piece.

When she approaches a new or unfamiliar song, she can "read" the music with no problem, but has to re-learn to connect what she sees and hears in her mind, to her fingers. Remarkably, with practice, she is doing this better and better every day.

See for yourself, below, in this brief clip (used with Angie’s permission). For this song Angie is reading from the page rather than playing from memory, so she is having to re-connect what her eyes are seeing with what she wants her fingers to do. It’s like re-learning how to catch a ball.

In one’s 50s inside an airplane, in one’s 100s at a rehab facility, at any age we do best when continuing to learn.