We are most of us likely, at some point in childhood, to have been told the story of Daedalus and Icarus.
This ancient Greek myth, which dates back to the earliest days of civilization, introduces us to the gifted and canny architect Daedalus, who was imprisoned by evil King Minos in a tall tower in an isolated corner of Crete, together with his beloved son Icarus.
Unwilling to spend the rest of his days in captivity, Daedalus constructed some wings by gluing together the feathers of passing birds with beeswax and invited Icarus to join him on the window ledge in a bid for freedom, but with one caveat.
If Icarus ever went too high, the sun's rays would turn the wax into liquid and Icarus would be done for, after successfully negotiating a way through Cretan airspace.
Somewhere past Samos, despite his father's kindly and patient warnings, Icarus got carried away.
The young man couldn't keep a handle on his joy.
His wings fell apart and he plunged into the sea, just off the coast of a picturesque small island that honours his memory to this day Icaria.
The way we're typically told the story, the moral is weighted firmly in one direction.
Don't get over-exuberant.
Keep a rein on your impulses.
Make sure you don't get big-headed.
Don't show off.
Calm yourself.
The myth would not have entered the folklore of our species if this were not supremely sensible advice.
Clearly, no good life is possible without a sharp awareness of the perils of egomania and of untempered raw appetite.
But the very solidity of the message is at risk of blinding us to a crucial subsidiary idea lurking covertly within the narrative.
This is not just a tale of pride and arrogance, not just a tale of getting too big for one's boots and of neglecting one's true position.
It's also a story of hope, of necessary escape, of giving something a chance of not remaining locked up forever at the whims of foolish authorities, of daring to plot an alternative.
For every one person who jumps out of towers without sufficient self-control, there are, we should note others, perhaps many others who, just as tragically, stay in towers their whole lives long, not just in one room, but at the edge of a box, within a cupboard, under a bed.
Too frightened ever to exceed to their own potency and freedom, too timid ever to dare to evade unfair restrictions, too cowed to bring themselves to imagine a better future.
There are, when we look at the matter squarely, in fact two morals in this central, ancient Greek myth.
The traditional one about the troubles of flying too close to the sun and also, more quietly, the lesser known one about the terrible risks of remaining a prisoner all one's life.
There is a figure in this story to whom we should look for clues as to how we might handle the painful dichotomy at play.
It's Daedalus who, despite what eventually transpired, should be recognised as having tried with particular dexterity to model for his son what a successful life could be like.
He didn't just warn Icarus of boundless dangers.
He didn't just go on about how bold schemes never work out and how timidity is mandatory.
He expressly didn't want his son to spend the rest of his days in confinement.
He spoke to him of the possibilities of trying on wings.
He wanted his child to head out on the prevailing currents and to have a shot at reaching new lands.
We should not inevitably deploy examples of ghastly accidents to impede our appetite for novelty and satisfaction.
We have clever minds with which to plot sound escape routes.
We can be ingenious in the face of our enemies.
We must, of course, take sensible precautions.
There are, of course, requirements for strategy and forbearance.
But if we only ever think of safety, if all we're obsessed by are the crashes, then we're fated to die in despair at any case.
There must and can be a good midway point between succumbing in a prison and drowning out at sea.
What typically shapes our underlying attitudes is, as it were, who Daedalus was for us.
There are fathers and mothers who talk to us gently and imaginatively about risks and returns.
They discuss the downsides of over-excitement but also of those of meekness.
And then there are others who cannot countenance their children ever taking to the skies, perhaps because they still haven't worked out a way out of prison for themselves.
We know a lot, maybe too much, about the catastrophes that can follow from ambition.
We shouldn't allow ourselves to forget that, whatever the fate of poor Icarus, there are always equally potent risks bound up with never pushing ourselves a little closer to our sun's vital and warming rays.
