PREVIEW EXCERPT of We Are Going In: The Story of the 1956 Grand Canyon Midair Collision

deeper my emotion will correspondingly be if I truly get it. There’s a big difference between a beautiful day and a glorious day.

Likewise, along with intellectually comprehending it, grasping tragedy is feeling sad and frustrated and appalled and compassionate and many other things, and at times feeling these ways profoundly. I wrote this book from a collaborative interplay of both perspectives, which was not only richly satisfying but also vital. Any portrayal can be accurate, meaningful, or inspiring only to the extent that the person who creates it grasps its object. This applies whether the object is an element of material reality or is something in the intangible realm of perceptions, ideas, and emotions. Whether physical or spiritual, I can’t very well portray it if I don’t get it.

Through a lack of perspective, whether that of the heart or the intellect, the truth is always left wanting, and this applies whether the side lacking is literally absent or is absent in the sense of being understated. Emphasizing the meaning of a thing over its value, or emphasizing its value over its meaning, distorts it. Either way, the truth is always misrepresented. As part of finding and grasping the truth, I was dedicated to illustrating it in true proportion, and so I needed to pay attention to my intellect and my heart equally and embrace whatever they told me with equal openness.

Naturally this simple outline is idealized—I couldn’t help but have some bias, because irrespective of how sincerely I tried to be open, I still had values and beliefs, and commitments to both, that I couldn’t honestly relinquish or even suspend, not even in the name of discovering the truth. I see no way around this. Everyone’s view is relative, meaning that it’s the partial view that can be had from his unique standpoint.

I can’t possibly avoid having a predisposition, because what that really means is having knowledge, and I can’t return to being a newborn, in that pure state of utter receptivity that exists before knowledge. What I can do is make a sincere effort to learn.

That is where real openness lies; it is the foundation of learning.

It is not disavowing or setting aside who I am. It is meeting what’s in - xxxix -