You win first prize and find yourself sitting in front of the only non-functioning entertainment system on board flight UA4 from Heathrow to Houston. You don’t really want to spend $22 on in flight wifi. You can of course still listen to a plethora of amazing tunes stored in your iphone. I literally stopped in my tracks when Perfect Day by Lou Reed came on. The song resonates with me in a quasi magical way. It has so much personal meaning for me now. Perfect days are hard to come by but I’ve had several recently. You can take also advantage of forced thinking time to ponder, to philosophise even.
Why, for example, when it is statistically much safer to fly than to drive, do I always get in my car without a second thought, but expect my plane to crash every time? It could be a flashback to that flight just after the London tube bombings when a dubious man with a back pack took his seat just in front of me. It could be the recollection of a flight so turbulent from Amsterdam to Manchester that the stewardesses were crying and praying. And no, I had not had any weird substances! It just gets my poor heart racing every time that “fasten seatbelt” sign comes on.
Everybody knows that long flights are great for convoluted revelations about your place in the universe. I must have had wind, for one such revelation entered my consciousness on pre-mentioned flight UA4. Two rows in front of me a young boy lifted up the window covering and the most glorious light flooded into the cabin. Until then it hadn’t even registered that every window was covered and that we were basking in glorious darkness. Sometimes we too don’t realise the position of darkness we have accepted to live in, until somebody or something enters our existence as a manifestation of blinding light, that transforms our mindset, our very lives even. I have had several of these eureka moments recently.
How about another! When we are living with things that are so big and insurmountable, we can lose perspective and wrongly believe that we are trapped and surrounded on every side. When we soar above, however, we realise, looking down, that what was once so immense is just one of many tiny dots below us. A bird’s eye view is a wonderful thing to possess. What about the mental health issues we all face: anxiety, depression, fear etc? That all consuming thing that you worried about for days on end…it happened and it was a tiny sparrow compared to the huge vulture encircling you and threatening your very existence.
I also pondered this fact during flight UA4: that I’m glad I’ve had my three rabies injections. Why? Because if I happen to get bitten by a rabid monkey, tree squirrel or heaven forbid a sloth, I will no longer be in the dire straits I would have been in without them. Everyone get your rabies shot from Boots today! Teachers, you don’t know which diseases those biting kids might be harbouring.
Anyway, some final waffly thoughts: keep allowing the fresh water of fun, new experiences and adventures to flow into your life pond. If not, it, and you, will become a stagnating stench that the evil mosquitoes of negativity and cynicism will feed off, an infestation that is sure to affect your entire circle. Of course, fun new experiences can be risky and dangerous. They take you to scary places, physical, mental and emotional, from which you may want to run a thousand miles.What you need to uncover within you is a daring recklessness infused with a liberal dose of insanity. These constitute the fuel that propels you forward into that fresh flowing stream of adventure.
Here conclude my philosophical ramblings while I wait in transit in Starbucks, Houston, Texas. It is 20.12 pm but my body clock is on 02.12 am and it’s been a long day. It was 93 degrees when we landed an hour ago. I will talk to you all again soon, hopefully with less waffle and much more fact. I hope to even add aphoto to this post in due course.
Si@cre8ivation
