500 Words a Week - Reflections from the Sky
Planes always provide us with a chance to reflect. Forced to slow down, to pause, to sit still for an allotted period of time. No signal, no notifications, no endless scroll to keep us distracted. Left to encounter what’s going on in our mind. For some who don’t slow down regularly, it can be a daunting and restless experience. You can see these individuals around you. Re-reading the same posts on Instagram that were previously loaded onto their feed. Going back through old emails. Reading menus inside and out. So used to hurrying through the world and now they’ve abruptly come to a stop. It begs the question, how often do we stop in our daily lives?
Planes for me also provide a sense of invigoration, a fresh start. Landing somewhere new, or returning home. There’s a sense of opportunity around us. We were just thousands of metres in the air. A feat of human engineering that for so long was doubted if it would ever happen, those that dreamed of it were mocked and ridiculed. And yet here we are. What are your dreams? Are you afraid to speak them out loud for fear of being mocked? Are you dampening your dreams in an attempt to fit in? If upon landing at your next destination, you became the type of person who dreams, not only that but the type of person who goes after their dreams, what would you do?
Just as planes can be seen as a marvel of human engineering. There’s something we encounter in planes and airports that remind us we haven’t got it all figured out. The wheeled suitcase. Humans had been to the moon before the invention of the wheeled suitcase. In fact, it wasn’t until 20 years after the Apollo 11 mission that wheeled suitcases began to become commonplace. Applying this to our life, we can place all our focus on the complex tasks and the future ahead, while forgetting about the simple things we could do in our daily experience that would immediately impact our quality of life. We chase sleep supplements, cooling mattress toppers, vagus nerve stimulating devices rather than putting ourselves to bed at an earlier and consistent time.
In order to reach this steel cabin of reflection in the sky, we have to go through a place that brings out the worst in people. Airports. Where emotions brim to the surface and people lose their reasoning abilities. All around us, we encounter outbursts of tiredness, hunger and hurriedness. In a storm of chaos, can you remain calm? Can you be a person who brings a human interaction to those working there? These are the people who are frequently on the end of others impatient outbursts. People forced to do their job of ensuring luggage meets the requirements, yet certain individuals feel like they are being attacked despite clearly not abiding by the rules. Whether the rules are just or not is another thing, but those on the gates don’t make them. Through small moments of presence, we can temporarily improve someone's day. A 5 second interaction in which you ask how are you, and actually wait to hear the response before barreling along your way.
