Life's Plane Trip

"Flying is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss." - Douglas Adams

My wife has been working very hard at understanding her person, the unique and special human being that she is. Why…I haven’t quite figured out. I find her already to be levels above me in emotional intelligence, intellectual intelligence and just simple goodness. If anyone should have an understanding of themselves I would have bet the bank it was her. Perhaps it is wrong to be the standard of measure for her. No, I know that is wrong and would be a self-centered attitude on my part to cultivate. But I believe it must come from the desire that lurks in our dark cellars that whispers that we are broken somehow and we need to be fixed.

It gives me a scratchy feeling that I am somehow wrong. Like a joke that might be a bit offensive (aren’t most jokes slightly offensive on some level?) and it leaves the teller or the listener a bit uncomfortable. That’s how life seems to strike me at times, strangely uncomfortable. Or leaves me feeling “comfortably numb” as the Pink Floyd song can be heard in the recesses of my mind. It makes me wonder what lies at the end of the universe; after all, doesn’t everything end? But in my mind that has only the five basic senses—touch, taste, sight, sound and smell—to process the reality that it faces, it withholds the greater mysteries that trouble me without answers.

When you roll a ball across a table, it reaches the edge, falls into a tangible space filled with air, till it strikes the ground. Then it may roll or bounce a bit until it comes to rest or encounters a wall or table leg where it will bounce off that or come to rest. Eventually when it has used all of its energy you will find it at rest against something substantial…in this example, the floor. There it will remain until a new force is added to it to begin moving again. Or, until it is picked up and set again on the table. Everything about it makes sense because it is processed by my available senses.

Now shoot a beam of light into space. It will travel through the distantness of that space…forever. Will it ever encounter the end of anything? The end of everything? And how can it reach the end of everything? At the end of everything is there something else? Einstein said something like it will eventually circle back and pass itself in time. In what I see—what I can process—there is always something following the last thing. When I was a kid, I repeatedly had a troubling dream about this stumbling question of forever. Infinity. That and another dream of a huge dinosaur coming towards my house with thundering footsteps of destruction. Oh, and then there was the dream of the shifting desert sands…

So my guess is that my wife is just learning how to land her plane better. I could use some help with that as well. Flying it better would also help. It seems to always land but some of the landings are rougher than others. And someday the flight may not have any ground under it and what a mystery will then unfold, more than likely opening up to a new sense that my human mind cannot comprehend on my human time of existence.