My friend Jay Pathak shared a story with me years ago, and it’s always stuck with me. It went something like this:

At the height of the Battle of Britain in World War 2, a British Royal Air Force squadron found themselves in a dogfight over the English channel. It was a mass of confusion, and one British pilot got separated from the rest of the group. His plane was shot up and none of his instruments were working. Except his radio. He was in a fog bank and unable to tell where he was. He desperately began calling for help on his radio, and miraculously he got a response from a British radar station on the coast. They had bad news: the rest of his squadron had been shot down. But the good news was they had him on radar and would talk him through limping his plane to the nearest airfield.

The pilot was relieved. The radar operator got him headed in the right direction. But the pilot saw something bizarre: a light passed by above his wing! He hurriedly told the radar operator, and the operator said that he must be flying too low, he needed to pull up immediately. The pilot acknowledged the message, and pulled up.

And promptly disappeared from the radar screen.

The radar operator tried to regain contact. Silence.

Later that day they sent out a search and rescue team to figure out what happened. They found the wreckage of the plane scattered on the beach just beyond a lighthouse. They determined the pilot must have been flying upside down. Without working instruments he had no way to orient himself. When he pulled up, he dove head first into the ground.

Yeah, there’s a shock value to that story. But it’s an accurate reflection of life. We are, by and large, flying upside down. We’ve been shot up and our the instruments in our lives are either broken – or worse, giving us the wrong information: that fame will give us intimacy, money will give us security, power will give us control, and career will give us meaning. But the things that we think will give us success – the things we’re told will give us altitude – are the things that will make us crash into the ground. We’ve got to get reoriented. We’ve got to get right side up.

So, that’s where I’m going to begin with Season 1 at The Counter Culture. We’re going to get ourselves flipped right side up and reoriented, so when we pull up we actually gain altitude.