Every time I fly somewhere it messes with my head. It is difficult to avoid feeling completely and utterly microscopic and in turn inconsequential when you really take in the view from 17000 feet in the air.
The stars don’t seem any closer but everything else looks like a glorified ant farm. To put the significant things and places in our lives that seem so huge urgent and enveloping into this “high up”
perspective is almost disturbing to me. I feel hopelessly and helplessly minuscule.
Don’t get me wrong I still absolutely love seeing the world from this viewpoint. To feel like you could race across a sea of clouds into the sunset is indescribable. Even from that little tiny window it honestly feels as though I mistakenly opened a secret door which only God himself can access and that I’m in the presence of a grandeur that I have absolutely no right to witness. Strangely enough it is in these moments that I am comforted in my sense of smallness. I humbly take my place in reverence to God’s everlasting beauty.
It is seeing the cities of thousands and in some cases millions of people reduced to such an objective level that is unsettling. Los Angeles is the most overwhelming. It isn’t until the plane reaches this endless glowing entrancing expanse that I feel completely besieged.
I realize that this is kind of ridiculous in a way as most people experience uncontrollable excitement as they take it all in. But is it so far-fetched that instead of imagining the glamorous Hollywood nightlife I imagine the nightmare of trying to find a place to sleep on Skid Row? Isn’t it understandable that what I see aren’t the young sexy execs with the world at their fingertips but the young sexually exploited women who have had their worlds ripped from their hands forced to live a life of slavery lost as only a face in millions? These are the situations I cannot ignore when I see the vast sea of lights lights and more lights.
Do you realize how small and unimportant this paper that you’re holding in your hands is in the perspective of the airplane passenger passing overhead let alone in the scope of the entire state country world or universe? But think how significant it feels to you right this moment. How important is what you are doing/are about to do/have already done at this point today? Your world is infinitely important to only you.
So what gets me is in the midst of this thought from 17000 miles up if this paper in your hands right now is this real this tangible this significant – how significant are the papers in the hands of those in all of Los Angeles or all over the country? Pink slips eviction notices subpoenas divorce papers college acceptance letters college rejection letters letters from incarcerated parents or kids bills more bills and on it goes. There are mindblowing circumstances facing millions of families right this minute. Yet most of these situations will eventually pass unnoticed and those people will go without help for another five ten or fifteen years – maybe forever.
I know that this is hopelessly pessimistic – which is kind of the point. What I realized in all of this reverie was that my attitude is exactly what the darkness hopes to achieve. If we become wholly frozen in non-action in the face of these extremely daunting realities there is no hope and there is no change.
All I hope to achieve is breaking through my part of that frozen wall. The same way each corner of this hulking metropolis was built brick by brick God can use us to bring light to those darkened corners.