Stranger to the Ground

I write this as I am headed back home after one more successfully executed event. The relief is immeasurable, and much thanks given that Murphy kept his laws firmly in his back pocket this time!

What with the increase in my traveling, over the past few months, I am learning more about myself, and perhaps a little about the people around me as well. Sitting in the airplane, looking at the clouds scudding by, squinting in the unadulterated sunlight, I am in a state of bliss.

It's official. I love flying. I love everything ABOUT flying. Not be mistaken for the common interpretation of flying, i.e., the act of boarding a commercial airliner for a dash across the country / globe at breakneck speed, being waited upon by a variety of stewards / stewardesses.

What I love is the sensation of leaving the ground and rising up in the air. There is a moment, during the ascent, when your heart seizes and releases with a pure burst of I-have-no-idea-what-but-will-call-it-happyhappyjoyjoy (My blog, my word!). I love happyhappyjoyjoy. I live for that moment, whenever I travel. And I am learning to live with the fact that this is irrevocably linked to sitting in a seat that is too uncomfortable for words, with armrests built for pygmies (and with my height, this is really saying something!), eating food that should be freeze-dried and launched into deep space, far away from the sphere of human activity.

Coming back to flying, or FLYING as my mind insists on the capitalization(!), I have learnt that the width of the grin, and ensuing happyhappyjoyjoy, is directly (if not exponentially!) proportional to the speed of the airplane as it hurtles down the runway, desperate to severe all ties with the ground.

I love peering down at the ground, watching the airport, the city, the people, the Earth grow smaller, and disappear like snow in summer, as we bank and head for the Sun. I also love watching them come closer and grow bigger, filling my sight, as the airplane comes in for a landing. Call me an idealist, but it actually makes me like people and places better. How can you not like anything that looks so good from way up in the sky?!

I have learnt that flying above the clouds is a discovery of a whole, new, world where anything ugly is incapable of existing. Looking past the tip of the wing, to where the white of the clouds contrasts sharply with the clean, bright, blue of the sky, with the Sun burning a spot on the whole canvas.

I have learnt that my latest burning ambition in Life is to fly one of these babies. Or if I can't have that, then to atleast be a part of the busy anthill of activity on the tarmac, as ground crew, involved in getting an airplane set for takeoff. That way, I am a PART of the grand thing that is FLIGHT.

I realise that the whole time I have been devouring Biggles & Richard Bach (yes, I am one of those who actually went way past Jonathan Livingstone Seagull and Illusions), I have been living vicariously...getting off on someone else's pleasure. And now, I want more.

To be a stranger to the ground.

**sigh**