Mr. Feuerstein added that “pilots tend to remember landings, in general, longer than takeoffs.” The challenges, and the professional satisfaction of safely completing a flight, are among the main reasons. But there are other factors, too. Many pilots enjoy exploring as much as any traveler might, and takeoffs , of course, are inevitably from a city to which we’ve already been. And while takeoffs offer a particularly pure sense of beginning, a landing is a beginning, too — one that can be full of anticipation for the new world we’ll soon be walking through.

I recently flew to Islamabad, the surprisingly verdant capital of Pakistan. It was my first touchdown in the country after many years of regularly overflying it. The experience of watching an impressionistic landscape, one that I’d previously seen only tens of thousands of feet below me, steadily resolve into the fine detail of towers, lakes, buses on wide highways and so many Pakistani trees — into the “world that still stands as / the trundling tires keep shaking and shaking the heart,” as the Nobel laureate Derek Walcott put it — remains the greatest wonder of my job.

Strangely, perhaps, landings even take precedence for me when it’s time to say goodbye to a city. Last year, on my final trip as a 747 pilot, the captain offered me the choice of flying the outbound leg from London to Cape Town, including the landing there, or the leg home, a few days later, which would start with takeoff from Cape Town. But, while a takeoff from Cape Town would have made for the more obvious goodbye to that beloved metropolis, I didn’t hesitate to opt for the landing there instead. An arrival was somehow the perfect farewell.

The old pilot joke about takeoffs and landings — that you want the same number of each — hints at another reason landings have become more meaningful to me. One of the less appreciated pleasures of the pilot’s job is its neatness (for lack of a better term). Unlike in the business world I worked in previously, there are no long meetings, tabled proposals or monthslong rollouts. Each flight is a discrete task, one that will always be circumscribed by flight-time regulations, the capacity of fuel tanks or — ultimately — the size of the earth.

One consequence of this way in which a pilot’s work is so neatly contained is that each flight starts to echo everything else that has an obvious beginning, middle and end. And as I fly through middle age, that’s an increasingly lovely thing. I want to tell my family and friends about it all: how the trees, and much else, were suddenly below me, and how that sight reminded me of the years when that was all I wanted.