ordinary day

"Just a boy, just an ordinary boy, but he was looking to the sky."

Tevin looked up into the shadowy evening sky and saw a hawk soaring above. For one split second, he knew he could fly. Not in an airplane or with jet pack. Not even with wings. Just him, sailing into the sky in his plain human body.

He found the though disconcerting and he tried to shake it away. So Tevin stopped looking at the sky and put his attention back on the 7th grade science exams he was grading. But that night he dreamed of flying, of seeing his house from a bird's eye view.

And the thought lingered. Tevin found himself having dreams of flying nearly every night. He would find himself absentmindedly searching articles about human flight on the internet. Of course the results would always be Superman images or some other science fiction/superhero reference.

But one day things changed. Tevin was again out on his back porch in the evening hours. A beautiful sunset stretched out in front of him. And Tevin was beginning the task of preparing future lesson plans for a new subject area, anatomy. Tevin opened the teacher's guide edition of the science book with the full intent to put together a lesson plan that provided a comprehensive, albeit brief, look at the entire body. But he never made it past the brain.

Specifically, Tevin got lost in a small subsection of the guide book entitled "The Mysteries of the Brain". Here, there was discussion about the untapped potential of the human brain. About how people with genius-level intelligence, musical prodigies, reputed psychics, and even some people with autism tapped into some parts of the brain that were dormant in the rest.

Tevin again thought of flying. But this time he didn't think with the imagination of a child but with the clarity of a scientist. And he decided that it was more than possible, it was doable. He decided that he would be the one to do it.