Heavenly Wanderlust

Unlike untold millions of travelers, flying fails to unnerve me. In fact, lifting off effects the opposite sensation: that cylindrical tube with all its hard-to-fathom propulsional force calms me. For this anomaly, I think there are two explanations:

First, when I find myself thirty-plus-thousand miles above the surface of the earth in a comfortable, commonly-blue bucket seat, few demands exact pressure upon me. Simply, for however many hours, I turn and enjoy the always blue sky, the chatoyant cumulous clouds, framed orderly by the rows of rectangular windows, each with their rounded edges. Only the sky requests my cathexis.

If we 'go down', I suppose, my responsibility as a compassionate human being - one who is certainly capable of astounding acts of unselfishness - requires me, at the very least, to aid my fellow passengers in finding the exits or securing their oxygen masks. But such an imposition has yet to befall me, thus leaving me with nothing really to do but sit peacefully. I am Ram Bahadur Bomjon in the sky.

At this, I am quite skilled. I press the concave silver button on my armrest and slip relaxingly into the downright position. All is well here, with my six-ounce complimentary beverage and airline amuse-bouche; here, for a few short hours, I am safe, untouchable, literally above it all.

More tranquilizing, however, is the perspective. Bird's eye, you might say. Forty-one thousand feet straight up reconfigures everything forty-one thousand feet straight down. The patchwork of the Middle West's farmland appears comfortingly organized and properly planned, set in place long before my birth as dreadfully efficient; the too-often-taken-for-granted Eisenhower expressway system cuts and weaves through the metropolis and countryside alike, bringing a nation and its people together; and the lakes, the rivers, the oceans - they find each other with ease from up here, more impressively than any map could ever depict. In this seat (whose benefit far outweighs its rising cost), the seaboard watershed reveals itself. I never fear that a drop will lose its way.

The perspective internalizes. To leave the earth behind is to free myself of the burdens it keeps. The mortgages, the bill payments, the friends and lovers who expect and reject me. The mismanagement and failures of my life on the ground grasp in vain to reach me here. But they cannot, and I laugh at their futility. The tabla is rasa. All is now and new and possible. I am reborn. I see the towering skyscrapers as nothing more than small-scale models. Your million-dollar mansion, with its limitless rooms and exorbitant pricetag is just another rooftop, only slightly larger than those single-family homes down the road. I can pick it up and drop it in the lake to its east. Here, I am closer to Heaven than to Hell. He sees, I imagine, similarly to how I see. This is how He can promise peace, I think. Our fatuous meddling below is to a Him fascinating and funny movement in the orchestrated human dance, all eradicable with the slowly deliberate ease of a thunderous, splenetic gesture. A flood here, a fire there. Come this way, mighty river; blossom near those woods, fair mountainside violets. You are my world. I have set you in (dis)order. I am God's seneschal. Until we land.

Please return your seats and your tray-tables to their original, upright positions, and thank you for flying S-------- Airlines.