Don’t Look Down

Yesterday I flew on an airplane to arrive at a city where I went to a hotel and rode the elevator to my room on the 10th floor.  As the elevator doors closed and I zipped upward, I thought about what was below me.  Hundreds of feet of air.  But it’s not scary because the doors close, the elevator music plays, and I feel nice and safe in a small little enclosed box.  I can’t see how high I am or the big drop below.   In the airplane, it’s even worse.

We board a plane and sit in our little rows of seats as if we are in a miniature movie theatre. The doors are shut, sometimes even the window shades are pulled, and we pretend to relax while hurdling along at 500 mph.  We are 35000 feet above the ground, held up by thin air.  In fact, the air just outside the closed window shade is so thin it won’t do you any good to breath it.  It doesn’t really matter anyway because at -40 degrees, it would probably freeze your lungs if you did take a breath. And since that -40 degree air is blowing at a constant 60 mph (even if the plane were not moving through it) it would probably freeze the rest of you pretty fast too.  Yet we sit inside sipping a Coke, eating pretzels, reading a book, and pretending the inside is all there is. We can ignore the insanity of the harsh environment outside because we are inside.  Meanwhile, we bet our life that a million things that could go wrong, won’t.  

I don’t know which is more crazy.  To fly in an airplane?  Or to live a life so inwardly focused that you don’t notice the insanity around you.