Fear of flying

If you travel by plane, you’re not what you are, especially if you travel alone. There’s no one next to you who’d confirm your existence. Therefore, for those few hours, you’re not fully a person, but just a sketch, a mere potential.

First of all, this has to do with physics – high in the sky you must have the highest potential energy (which, as I always imagined, simply means that if you potentially fall, then you’ll do it with a lot of actual energy. So much energy in fact that it will transport you to a different realm. It probably doesn't mean that on board a plane you become particularly energetic).  Secondly, you’re not really a person – because you’re a person- in- the-skies, between the ground and eternity, having no control of what will happen next. You’re close to a potential non-being, even though it’s statistically very unlikely. 

Therefore, before the plane touches the ground, you’re in between being and non-being.  You try to alleviate this uneasy state by talking to someone, working, reading or sleeping. Those activities are an attempt to confirm that you still are the same person as you were on the ground, because after all - you're doing your usual things. But you’re not. Not before the touchdown.

Shall I try to kill the time or devote it to the essential? I opt for the latter. My head grows pregnant with thoughts; I search for the sense of life.

Soon comes the verdict. Relieved, you touch the ground (“I was being very foolish and neurotic” you think). Suddenly you change perspective and you become a full YOU again. Careless and excited.

But how about those thoughts? Intangible creatures, suspended between being and non-being? Have they landed with me, or did they stay in the clouds?

I try to find them back, in my head or jotted down. But they’ve suddenly lost their intensity. When I read them now, they sound neurotic and terribly exaggerated. It’s only on board that they live up to their true meaning. The moment the plane touches down, they lose their force, which is only to return when I’m in the air next time. My quintessence stayed in the clouds. It cannot land.