Providence

When I was small I used to get goosebumps when I thought about airplanes. To ride an airplane was an amazing feat—to suddenly go from home to a new place in the span of hours. It evoked a sense of wonder and dread—wonder that I could be so high in the air and so quickly displaced from all that is familiar, and dread that my life is fragile and I could feasibly plummet into the depths of the sea and disappear into oblivion if the plane malfunctioned.

My envisioning of “airplane” is no different than that of real life, as both should rightly incur both wonder and dread. It’s remarkable, really, if you ponder it.
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You are leaving a distinct location and its concomitant memories behind and moving onward to something else completely new. Even if you are returning home you are different, affected by what you just left, so you are beginning a very real and tangible new chapter. The place you have left was once foreign but is now familiar—not just lodged in your memory but something that has changed your very being. And if what you have left is home, it is only home because you have made it home, whether over a span of sixty years, six years, or six days. Therefore, even “home” was once foreign. .

That time in the air, away from everything old and new is a glorious in limbo state where you’re neither here nor there physically but a little bit of both interiorly, reflecting on where you were and anticipating where you’re heading. And as you look out across the varied horizon you realize that life is both microcosmic and macrocosmic in scope. Humans are but tiny chess pieces placed on a giant board, yet that board has no limits and everything matters. You are daily living this gigantic paradox of being a tiny and seemingly insignificant creature in a vast world whose actions and mere physis, or being, is actually large and significant.

That in limbo state is overpowering when experienced in full. An array of emotions and thoughts collide so you’re not really sure if what you think and feel in the here and now is reliable, for you felt content in the place you are leaving but now you are in the air and that place is diminishing in time and space and the contentedness…what was it, really? Now the wonder and awe of the future is absorbing you. And when you think about it, you are eve more awed about the present: that your emotions could so quickly fuse together, that past and future could so quickly melt into one state in your mind. Where have the lines of demarcation gone?

You think about it, and realize that though everything is jumbled while in the air the past and future remain distinct. Old things make sense and you that what was once broken is now fixed and that you are staring into Purpose. So even though you have no idea where you are right now and you may now know where you’re going, you know two things for certain: you have come from someplace and you are going somewhere. There IS direction, but you only see it now where time zones mix and all that is distinct on the ground becomes one Earth from above. Everything is horribly blended now, but it is in that very fusion that you more clearly recognize the distinctions, maybe for the first time, even.

Life appears but fleeting. You are always on a plane—always leaving somewhere and going somewhere else, never on the ground. In the grand scheme of things, life on Earth is but temporary, for soon you will be seated at the right hand of God or burning in the depths of hell, but this transitory state does not lack meaning. Quite the contrary, life IS meaningful and only when you’re observing it from a bird’s eye view—neither here nor there—can you see just how far you’ve come and just how far you’ll go. You have put on the lens of Time, experiencing past, present, and future simultaneously though not knowing the details of those states.

For are we ever “here” or “there?” We are always moving on, moving up, moving forward and moving back. The direction itself is irrelevant; the point is that we’re in motion from on state to another…from melancholia to joy, from childhood to adulthood, from melancholia to joy, , from east to west, from sleep to wake, and then back again. We are always in transition, always learning, always changing, always growing.

I saw all of this on a single plane ride over New England.