AIR PEOPLE – By Roberto Dansie

Air represents the mind, people who experience and see the world mostly through the prism of the mind. Just like earth people are body centered, and water people are feeling centered, the air people are centered in the mind. Thought, is the guiding principle of their lives. Their challenge is to get out of their head. Because of their constant application of their minds to life, they have a tendency to get lost in thought. Yet, thought provides them with a fine instrument to analyze the world, their relations, and the way to handle the challenges of life. Often, air people play the role of advisor or leader in their social circle; when they are growing up, their perspective tends to be more rational and responsible than that of the adults around them. They figure out systems and patterns, and are unlikely to take things personally. We are told that Vladimyr Lenin, the author of the Russian revolution, having been captured by his opponent, analyzed the situation and told a friend, “You will see, this is the time when they will kill us.” Then he proceeded to tell his comrade all of the reasons why their opponents would choose such a time to take them out. When this didn’t happened, and the comrade was celebrating their being alive, Lenin just shook his head, and said, “They just did not know when they had the upper hand.”

Those are comments proper of an air person: they never loose their cool, they just considered their situation, check their options, and deal with issues.

I remember, growing up, Martin, my youngest brother, got a beautiful toy truck for Christmas. The truck will move on its own, without batteries or electric plugs: it just needed to be cranked long enough, and it would take off on its own. A few hours later, my parents found Martin on the floor: he had disassembled the toy into its parts, looking carefully at each one of them. He was warned that he would not get a toy for a long time, but he did not understand why. For him, the main thing was to figure out how the toy worked. Being still a child, and ego centered in his understanding of others, he figured that they would be just as interested as he was to find out how the truck worked. Focus is the great strength of air people: it is also their main weakness. Remember, when people are in “point cero” (the place which gives them perfect balance) they apply their inclination without attachment, which gives them skill (or “virtue”). When they are off balance, their inclination becomes attached. It is then that problems or imbalances appear. In the case of the air person, under pressure, they tend to become extremely focus, which makes them come across as insensitive because they simply are focusing, exclusively, with what they determined the priority at that time and place.

Air people are particularly aware of the multiplicity of perspectives that can take place beyond the objective world. If, for example, they see a person who does not often make their bed, they don’t rush into judgment. They consider all of the different reasons why such person has for that behavior. They consider that maybe it is a person who likes to be taken cared off; or that they have a different set of priorities; or they balance their order at work with the chaos at home. And their search for explanations may continue for a long time: air people see the many worlds that live in our world. For them, the mind is the world to be lived and explored: they are minds seeing minds. They venture into the world of ideas, the field of equations, of causes, of explanations; they enjoy solving or figuring out solutions; for them, insight into the principles that affect the universe gives them their major trill. It is like a Greek wise man, which declined being the king of his country: he would not change a kingdom for the experience of finding out how the world worked. Or, Archimedes who, when about to be killed by an invading soldier was absorbed in equations that he had drew in the sand, and was not distracted with the impending death that he had seen coming to him. A mind, so real, that the ordinary world just disappeared.