Leaving on a Jet Plane...

Leaving on a plane is a little like dying! Whatever you got finished before you left is finished. Whatever you left unaccomplished is just that -- incomplete. Just as in death, you are boarding a ship for an unknown journey. You think you know your destination, but things could intervene. The destination might be different somehow than what you imagine --- it might be a surprise!

As I boarded the plane (exhausted from putting the library to bed on Friday, packing until 1 or 2 a.m. Friday & Saturday, and tying to tie up all the loose ends before departure) I have a mix of anticipation and sadness. I am leaving behind the familiar, the comfortable, and the predictable. I am leaving behind my family and friends all my routines. But as I settle into my seat next to two German friends who have been vacationing on Longboat Key, Florida, a certain peace pervades my consciousness.

I wonder why I can't extend this peace that things are now out of my hands and control is in the hands of others. In many ways this is the way of it. We cannot control our health, or a criminal's choice to rob or end another's life, or even our circumstances at work. The truth is we can only tack our sails depending on what life gives us. Yet, I know when I return to earth I will take all the of weight of responsibility and worry back as if I did control those things!

Physicist Leo Szilard once announced to his friend Hans Bethe that he was thinking of keeping a diary "I don't intend to publish. I am merely going to record the facts for the information of God." "Don't you think God knows the facts?" Berte asked. "Yes, said Szilard, "He knows the facts, but he doesn't know this version of the facts."

(I found this quote in A short history of everything - the book I was reading on the plane)

So it is that I will begin my "diary" of this trip so that the facts can be recorded from my perspective, in case God is curious! After dinner I note we are 1/3 of the way to Munich. There is a track of the plane superimposed on what appears to be a google map of the earth. We are just about to leave land and begin the transit of the Atlantic just South of Greenland.

People settle in for the night and cabin noise becomes more hushed as the lights of the cabin are dimmed. Plenty of things to distract -- movies on the screen, music in the earphones, newspapers, magazines----just like at home --it is seldom that we see people living in the present moment. What would happen if we did live more intentionally in the present moment?

I find my distraction in Bill Bryson's book "A Brief History of Nearly Everything" which provides a fascinating insight into science and scientists since the 18th century. His writing is a fast moving narrative providing tantalizing details about the lives of people whom we revere as giants. There are characters here which I have children's biographies for -- I am thinking next fall we might do some of these as Lunch Bunch Choices with the details added in this book which humanize the greats in humorous and eccentric ways! I fall asleep and sleep fitfully (it is cramped in steerage, and I know those in 1st class are stretched out on recliners with footies and every need tended!

Dawn floods the space with rose light and we are nearing the end of our journey. Interesting details like the airspeed, temperature outside the cabin, altitude, tail wind were displayed between movies all night long. It was -70 F tail wind averaged 100 miles per hour, speed hovered at 690 mph. We have landed, and all confidence disappears!