Flying high
In the eight months since I moved back to the east coast, I’ve flown between Chicago and New York City 55 times. It’s a small price to pay to spend time with Elevator Girl, who moves east in just eight weeks. Finally! And I know we’re fortunate to have been able to spend so much time together when most people in similar situations just can’t. But, of course, that doesn’t eliminate the inevitable frustrations.
Yesterday, the plane left LaGuardia on time then slow-rolled for 20 minutes. Then another 20. We stopped. The captain hopped on the blower to tell us a storm had closed one of the runways; we were going to be delayed “for a bit.” We sat. After 30 minutes, we were told the storm had to pass before traffic resumed. Another 30 minutes later, the plane was engulfed by sidewards rain. A solid 30 after that, we finally took off—right around the time we were originally scheduled to land in Chicago. Better late than never. We speared into the remnants of the storm system, jostling and bumping and ducking and diving as the plane gained altitude.
And then it suddenly smoothed out and … the view was amazing.
The vast majority of my fellow passengers just talked or listened to music or left their blinds down for reasons I’ll never understand during a daytime flight. Many grumbled about the delay and the need for what today passes as airline food and seethed at the person in front who reclined their seat—with force—the second the seatbelt sign went off. Yet right out the window was a view that barely a hundred years ago any human had about as much chance of seeing as walking on the moon.
Call me old and increasingly sentimental, but I’m so grateful just to be here; to see this. To have met the most extraordinary woman and daily feel the joy of being a father and the privilege of watching my sons grow. To look forward to seeing my brother next week and again in June; for the most important people in my life to all be together in August. To marry in October! I’m trying every day to take none of this for granted; to fight against the extraordinariness of ordinary life being buried by everyday frustrations and annoyances and bad drivers and seasonal allergies and property market madness and people who don’t put their shopping carts back. It’s not easy, especially when you overlay everything with the incessant barrage of WTF shenanigans coming out of Washington.
But how lucky are we?! Even ignoring that I get to tap this on a pocket supercomputer (albeit one that’s deliberately and destructively addictive), when the Wright brothers flew for the first time in 1903, the average life expectancy in the United States was 47. Odds are I would have dropped dead five years before turning 52 today, and certainly wouldn’t have been able to realistically expect to keep rocking for at least three more decades. I may moan about being on the downhill run to oblivion, but the reality is I’m basically only at halftime. The whole second half of my adult life is still to come.
Oddly enough—given that I’m an atheist, in case that hasn’t been obvious—I this week thought about gratitude following the death of Jorge Mario Bergoglio. Let’s set aside the deeply problematic Catholic Church, if that’s possible, and separate the man from the irreparably flawed institution. Actually, let’s not—because it always struck me that Jorge, better known as Pope Francis, was only too aware of the church’s deep rot and of the fatal flaw of a business model that requires customers to buy a product for which there’s no evidence, with delivery only coming once you’re dead. I take that for what reason dictates—that there’s no God—and I find the mountains of evidence that our universe and this speck we inhabit evolved organically over trillions of years infinitely more awe-inspiring than the idea of some omnipotent Dumbledore.
Francis’ take was different, obviously. But two things struck a chord for me. First, he clearly had doubts. “In this quest to seek and find God in all things there is still an area of uncertainty,” he said in 2013. “There must be.” And just as I can reserve a tiny piece of my brain to accept there’s a possibility—no matter how infinitesimally remote—that all of this springs from some higher being, the fact Francis clearly grappled with that was both intensely human and admirable, given that blind faith is the core underpinning of church doctrine. And, second, he tried to strip the church back to basics.
There’s a lot of weird shit in the Bible, and religion has a lot—a lot—to answer and atone for. But at a fundamental level, faith should be about how we treat others and the world we share. It really doesn’t matter how or when or why or what this world sprang from—we get to experience it regardless. It’s easy for that to be lost in the day to day grind, and I totally get how that happens and would never begrudge a good vent. But as we ride through storm after storm, it’s nice to every now and then—just once in a while—stop to find yourself floating above the clouds. It’s pretty damn amazing.
A note about whatever this is …
After writing a few thousand articles for newspapers and magazines, I spent a long time trying a bunch of other stuff. I guess I figured what came (relatively) easily must by definition be less valuable, so I wandered in the corporate wilderness, becoming increasingly frustrated and doing work that felt increasingly lousy.
Sometimes with age comes wisdom, and I’ve realized finding something (relatively) easy ain’t a bad thing. So, this is a space where I’m resurrecting writing for myself, on topics weird and wild and wonderful.
Posts will appear when the mood takes me, but I do try to be consistently inconsistent—sometimes it’ll be a couple of days between drinks; sometimes a week. But if you subscribe, you’ll get a email letting you know I’m ranting. Again.