Just arrived back from Europe a couple of hours ago, fully jet lagged and bit over dosed on work, and admittedly chocolates too. Haven't slept much. Looking forward to bubble bath and deep sleep before the nut house called work starts again tomorrow.
(And to those of you loyal friends who are not letting me snooze on my mandatory daily word count -- my manuscript hit a glitch called Transatlantic airborn nausea, turbulence, sleepiness and too much of that annoying thing called that interrupting job. This weekend will have to be a marathon make-up session!)
Yet I wanted to squeeze in a moment to write a note of gratitude.
Today hauling through Schipol airport, I was reminded that millions of passengers connect through there every year -- departures to thousands of destinations - Tehran, Tel Aviv, Accra, Dubai, Paris, Lagos, Bombay, Kuala Lumpur, Moscow, Tbilisi, and so on and on. If we create all possible starting and ending points, all possible paths, we have to do a factorial math problem. We'd be here all night figuring that out.
It all reminds me of that weird quirk of flying; flights park every walk of life into a small space, into a bunch of small chairs, with nauseating turbulence, unpredictable food, lip-cracking dry air, claustrophobic toilets, yet we're expected to all to get along. Several hundred of us -- all launching in different directions, yet for hours, parked in a cramped chair, belted in, stuck, not moving, together. Planes hold the excited, the depressed, the anxious, the tired, the coming, the going, the fleeing, the seeking, the rich, the poor, the perfumed, the smelly, the snoring, the gabbing, the laughing, the hopeful, the hopeless, the crying, the sleepy, the sick, the pained, the free, the content, the burdened - all headed somewhere, with something anticipated at the landing spot.
Yet I always take it as comfort that millions upon millions of us do this peacefully every year, world wide. Paths crossing, jammed into tiny seats, in confusing airports, long lines, sprinkled with the sometimes cranky, the often arrogant, yet we get through, depart, visit, return, arrive, come home peacefully, together.
Yet as we all know, there are those few thugs on the planet that don't want that to go well. Who want it all to fall apart. Who work strategically to make that tragedy certain.
I can speak from my own experience, it is easy to forget how much gratitude is due to the many hard working folks who are out there keeping our skies clear. It is no coincidence that the skies have been clear, not dark and bloody as they were on that 11th day of September.
So I send along gratitude to all of you that today the skies were clear, and that the biggest problem I have this evening is fatigue and too much chocolate. I arrived home safely because of the many of you. And thanks to your dedication and sacrifice, we can take for granted that the skies are predicted clear tomorrow too.
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