by Paul Finley
"Show me how, show me how!" This was the exclamation of our two oldest daughters as I was demonstrating how to fold paper airplanes. What seems like something so ingrained in my muscle memory, it is hard to realize that what you are doing may actually look very different or confusing to a six- and seven-year old. After a few tries and a few rounded, squished nosed asymmetrical beauties, we were off to the paper plane races!
My wife shared some photos with our friends of our middle daughter, Lili's, new found interest in aerial origami a couple of weeks ago. I taught Lili a basic paper airplane design and she went on to make twenty in a row. Well a few days later, our dear friends generously gifted us with a 365 "plane a day" calender box set. Now we have every plane shape, wing design, and folding schismatic know and unknown to man — or at least to this one!
It is really funny to look at these diagrams and start folding and cutting away to create a little paper projectile that very well may do a speeding loop right back at your face or cruise gracefully across the house, which in our case is not impossible to accomplish!
Building these silly little planes and watching them zing across the living room made me start to think about how many times I judge something wrongly. At first I would look at the plane and the shape and say..."ah ha, this one is going be great" ..err, a dud. Two feet from leaving my finger tips, the thing hooks and slams against the wall. Then, low and behold the next one looks like a complete cluster of folds and creases in all the wrong spots and it turns out to be the Red Baron. It made me wonder how many times I go through my day and wrongly judge people around me, not allowing them a true identity in my mind before I place them in a box, a category, or compartmentalized stereotype.
It was so great to see little Lili pick up the ones that really were terrible fliers (everyone in the house new it) and just swoop them up and race them through the house, never throwing them, just gracefully flying them around. Maybe, that’s what more of us need and what more of us should give our fellow man, some help to fly gracefully along their way. I know I could use it.
