Between Home and Where I Live: Flying

           There's a moment, when a plane is barrelling down a runway, and the engines rev.  A second of energy diverted before the nose lifts up and there's no going back.  When I fly, I like to count the seconds between the flight attendants sealing the door and the roar of the engines increasing, just that little bit, to lift us off the ground and launch us into the sky at 600 miles an hour.  Somehow in my brain I have the idea that up until that second, I haven't committed to flying.  To hurtling through the air in an aluminum and steel tube from one place to another.  That there is a magic "escape" button that I could still push while the wheels are on the ground that would get me off the plane.

          I technically know better.  The last actual moment to chicken out and bail is the second before they close that door at the end of the loading ramp.  Sealing us and our pressurized air into the tube.  Minutes, and sometimes even an hour (depending on the airport and the day) before the plane is actually in the air.  With each of those seconds that I count, I remind myself how lucky I am.  I bought  plane ticket.  I can live in one place and visit another that is half way across the country or the world.  Continents and oceans are no barriers to what I can see and where I can travel.  i have the extraordinary privelege of strapping myself to a plastic seat, and quite literally flying through the sky.  
           And yet.  The act of clicking "purchase" when buying a plane ticket is quite literally terrifying.  Because flying means a handful of things every time it happens.  Flying means that I need to leave a place that I usually like being.  Whether it's home or somewhere else.  Flying means that I need to again face my own irrational fear of literally falling out of the sky.  Flying means re-evaluating the way that I live my life, as I see it again in another light.  The light of perspective added by a new place, or an old place revisited.  Flying means embracing the unknown of the future.  The reality of not knowing what the next second or the next hour or the next week, or month or year will bring.  I know that that unknown exists in each and every second.  Waking up in an unfamiliear bed doesn't make the day less predictable than it already wasn't.
          Being alone in a new place doesn't mean that the unexpected is more likely to occur.  It just means that I am more aware of the tenous nature of our experience.  The unexpected quality of life.  The subtle balance we play between responsibility for the future, and total blindness as to what it holds is one we all hold each and every day when we get out of bed in the morning, brush our teeth and go to work, planning our next vacation day or the weekend yet to come.  
          Every time I fly, I am reminded how short the days are that I get to count as they slowly pass by.  And that is compounded whenever I fly between the city I call home, Portland OR, and wheve-ever it is that I happen to live.