A Slight Detour April 21,2013

Dawn over the Pacific 

 Like many moments of any importance in my life,  I often marvel at my own participation in them. What is my own tenacity and hard work and what is fate ? I begin to review the overall process that brought me to whatever it is I am in the middle of then I start to second guess how I got there at all....  How much of one or the other that comes into play at any moment is the Mystery to me. Which in some ways that very appreciation and sense of gratitude I am feeling or the "marvel factor"  sometimes keeps me at a distance from the whole experience.   .....Confused yet!?  Yeah well you're not alone. At this moment , however, I can't distance myself.  I don't have the luxury of a review, and the whole second guessing of how I got here? Forget it. I am 3000 feet in the air somewhere over the Pacific &  I haven't slept a wink in 14 hours . I hate to fly so the only review I am doing is an “observation game” of my surroundings to keep myself from jumping up out of my seat and yelling “We are all going to Die!” because the storm the pilot is trying to maneuver above seems to be dogging us with his every attempt to gain more altitude.  If I hold on to every fact of what I can actually “see” instead of my imaginings of a cockpit in chaos I might get through this flight without embarrassing myself.The seats in Economy are comfortable ,wider than most, with the individual screen that most airlines provide but with an adjustable headrest and footrest that I, sadly, have not discovered until this moment. The stewardesses on Singapore Air are as pretty as I remember from a business flight I took to Malaysia years ago .They seem to float down the aisle in very feminine outfits that don't look like a uniform at all but more like beautiful native costumes. None of them have that harried pinched look of so many other stewardesses that seem to say "Ask me one more question as to why we are out of your overpriced food selection or about the pillows we no longer provide and I’m gonna blow quicker than you can say “Flight Marshall".  Speaking of food... I have had more free food being automatically served to me at regular intervals on this one flight than all the domestic flights I took in the last two years so I'm thinking another reason ,for my partial paralytic mental state besides total abject fear , is most likely a food coma. That and the sudden awareness that I haven't left my seat once in the entire flight. Did I mention it was a 14 hour flight ?  The only thing that makes the inability to feel my legs at the moment bearable is the distraction of the extreme pain in my lower back because I have to pee and I have been trapped in my window seat by the “fasten seatbelt” sign since the turbulence began nearly 45 minutes ago.  Even though we are making our descent ,that sense of gratitude and relief that I always feel when the plane, any plane I'm on lands safely, anywhere is now totally eclipsed by this fact,  SO here I am bargaining with God to prevent an accident of a different kind.  My two seat mates, fast asleep ,and in their own version of a food coma, remain blissfully unaware that at any moment we could all be underwater even if the plane is not.

Then suddenly ,I  feel the landing gear go down ....The missed flight out of LA in spite of being 3 hours early? The two hour pat down through security before boarding that caused the missed flight ? Barely making the connection in San Francisco at 1 am? Even the pain in my back?

None of that matters any more ... I am landing in Asia.