Personal Journal

Fear Of Flying

Fear has a feeling.
There’s a heat to it, and that rippling electric current you feel when you touch an open wire, only it’s not on the extremity, it’s somewhere inside of you where mind and body meet.
I’m afraid when I sit in airplanes and they shudder.
I’m afraid when I think about what I would feel if the thin fuselage was ripped from between me and the air coldly whipping by at 350 knots.
I know that it’s not logical to think of those things.
I know that the statistics should comfort me.
I know that at best, I should force myself to thik about something else, because there’s no way to think “what if” 7 miles high and not suddenly realize that “if” happens, there are only two or three things to hope for. You hope you lived a good enough life that god would forgive you for your failings. You hope the end comes quickly, and you hope by some miracle, you find peace in that moment.
Inevitably, that’s what I end up thinking about. Whether or not I could hold those 3 hopes, and I propel myself to experience the moment where my death bridges the point between theoretical and immenent. There are people, simpletons, who would say to someone who is afraid to fly, as I am (mostly) that it’s really a control issue.
Well, rubes though they be, grasping at means to make themselves superior to others, they may be right. For me, what I wish to control is myself, my thoughts, my serenity. Will I be my own mother at the moment I realize I must die, or will I cry out for mine. Will I measure up to some measure of bravery.
Of course, it’s absurd to spend the energy I do thinking about it.
That’s the nature of fear, and of cowardice that possesses me in that situation.
Cowardice prevents one from acting despite fear.
Fear corrupts enlightened thought.
I must be developing some bravery, then, because I’m able to stop myself from thinking about the fear.
Maybe they were just smooth flights…


It is never too late to be what you might have been. -- George Eliot
Courage to start and willingness to keep everlasting at it are the requisites for success. -- Alonzo Newton Benn