Liz called herself a "meddling grandmother" -she wanted her granddaughter to be aware of all the opportunities that she had available to her that her own generation did not. Distraught because her granddaughter had no goals, Elizabeth Muir wrote a book on 100 years of Canadian women in aviation in order to inspire her to find something she was excited about.
Liz told many stories of these incredible women who often fought discrimination and social stigma to follow their dreams (and still do! she stated that only 6% of airline pilots are women! STILL!).
Louise Mitchell Jenkins was one of those women -she earned her pilots licence in 1932 and was one of the first Canadian women to own a plane. Louise loved flying so much that she would fly almost every day. She was considered “airplane crazy”. She would fly her son to boarding school and her daughter to summer camp. She didn’t need a reason, she flew “to add excitement to my life”. Then, when her husband became ill in 1933, her friends convinced her stop flying as they didn’t want to see her 4 children orphans. The story goes that each time afterwards, that she would see or hear an airplane, she would cry.
Maybe you aren’t “airplane crazy” – it may be something else that you keep thinking about. Do you have a passion that you need to follow so you don’t die with that regret in you? Is there something you have always wanted to do but haven’t yet? Isn’t it time that you took action on that?
Our family and friends might not understand it, but leaving these songs in us unsung can be painful and leave us with regrets. Don’t be one to cry every time you see an airplane – take action and live your dreams. If not now, when?
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