I’m sitting in a straight-back chair with a fastened safety belt, 35,000 feet up on a hot summer day. All around me are clouds; the white, puffy, cotton-ball clouds that give young imaginations the best fodder you could ask for.
I remember clouds like this from summer afternoons as a boy; from long, hot, lazy days filled with lemonade and basketball games. No matter what games we played, though, it seems we almost always found time and a patch of grass to just lie down and watch. Dragons and ships and fish and who knows what else we’d see; anything could happen when the clouds were just right.
Somehow, though, somewhere along the way the clouds became just that: clouds. Cumulus and status and cirrus and nimbus, all just clumped up bunches of water and ice. No more fishes, just ordinary clouds.
Maybe grownups just get so busy with life on the ground that we forget what it was to see life in the sky. Maybe we feel so locked in to the drive to produce and perform that we become heads-down people.
Maybe it’s time for a change.
I think that’s one reason I love to travel, that I feel it’s not just the destination that matters. I find that the string of moments in-between places is often just what I need to get some perspective, to pull my head up.
For me, it’s these moments of reflection that make the journey all the more worth taking; moments like this one at 35,000 feet; remembering the fishes in the sky.
