Midflight thoughts

Heartburn has me up at 5something AM...in more ways than one. Being gone in Mexico for a week was only a small band-aid. In fact, I think it just magnified some of the other problems. There are a lot of fake people out there with no real substance or motivation in life. Weeding them out of my life is proving to be harder than I ever thought it would be.



I usually have a lot of time to think when I'm flying. I just plug in my ipod and let the music carry me to wherever my mind needs to go. I watch the clouds roll by and the landscape below dot its way across the horizon like notes on a scale. I'm always amazed at clouds - the more I look at them, the more I think they must have been one of God's greatest creations. I also love watching the sunset from the sky. It's like nothing else. You'll never be able to see the colors that are created with the sun boucing off the tops of the clouds unless you're in the sky to see where they meet. I don't like the suffocating feeling of flying, but the time it gives me to gather my thoughts is usually welcome. My mind wandered all over the place on this flight. I think it found permanent residency in some of the places that it travelled to.

I watched a Tyler Perry movie "The Family That Preys" on the flight and it settled in right next to my thoughts. I love his movies for the underlying messages that he conveys. The tagline for this movie is "Follow your heart, but watch your back."
There were a couple of questions posed throughout the film that I made note of on a personal level...
Remember when you used to dream? At what point did you stop dreaming about what you want from life?
Are you living or just existing? This was acompanied by the lyrics of the theme song:

I hope you never lose your sense of wonder,
You get your fill to eat but always keep that hunger,
May you never take one single breath for granted,
GOD forbid love ever leave you empty handed,
I hope you still feel small when you stand beside the ocean,
Whenever one door closes I hope one more opens,
Promise me that you'll give faith a fighting chance,
And when you get the choice to sit it out or dance.

I hope you dance....I hope you dance.

I hope you never fear those mountains in the distance,
Never settle for the path of least resistance
Livin' might mean takin' chances but they're worth takin',
Lovin' might be a mistake but it's worth makin',
Don't let some hell bent heart leave you bitter,
When you come close to sellin' out reconsider,
Give the heavens above more than just a passing glance,
And when you get the choice to sit it out or dance.
I love the lyrics from that song, but I forget to listen to them with more than just my ears sometimes. It's high time I started listening to things with my heart more often. Settling for the path of least resistance seems to be the story of my life as of late...



Despite my best efforts, flying is always an comedic adventure somehow and this one was no exception. I lost one side of my earphone cover before the flight even started, cut my toe open on my computer bag midflight somewhere over the Gulf of Mexico, broke the underwire on the right side of my bra as I was talking to my flight neighbor, and cracked the Mexican pottery that I was so careful to carry on while I had to repack the liquids prior to reboarding in Houston, Texas. As I practically crawled out of my skin from being stuck on a plane for far too long with an achey toe and the fear that I was going to be stabbed through and through by razor sharp wire, I couldn't help but imagine that all the times I've been on a plane, I had never felt so conflicted about coming home. If home is where your heart is, then I don't quite know where to hang my hat, but I do want to find out where that place is. I think I'm going to have to start down some paths of resistance while I'm still young enough to believe that I can do anything.

Right now I'm going to try and believe that I can sleep despite Insomnia's best efforts to keep my mind from drifting off into those clouds again...