Time for the Salt Lake shuffle again. My bi-weekly run from Pasco, Washington to Denver. There is something liberating about flying. As you lift off the ground your responsibilities just fall away, and in the air you have no other place to go and nowhere else to be. You are achieving a goal (going somewhere) just by sitting in this plane and reading. I find it a good place to take a short respite from my never ending search for unclaimed guilt and regret to acquire. I'm a guilt sponge, I will suck up some spilled guilt like you wouldn't believe. And a regret magnet, can't forget that. I'm probably the only person in the world that can walk out of a restaurant and experience guilt and/or regret for the amount of the tip for the next two hours. I regret everything from being away from my children, to ever meeting my exwife (the obvious ironic dichotomy), to not joining the crew team in college, to taking that loan on my 401K and cashing those savings bonds, to not pursuing a degree in forestry, to throwing up at lunch time when Dishman laughed and that yellow stuff came out of his nose....wait that was in the 3rd. Grade...I suppose it's time to let that one go...whew, it's finally over. I regret never having a new bike when I was a kid. I regret never having a mentor in high school. I regret never being the subject of applause, (wait a second if we start going there this list could get way too long etc. etc. ought to cover it). I regret this inability to not regret. This entire posting is making me feel guilty now. I can't eat potato chips without hating myself in the morning. And French fries-Gawd don't get me started-the new cigarette of the 2000's. Thank heavens I'm not susceptible to commercial guilt/regret. I'm don't worry about body odor, yellow teeth, an inferior cell phone, male pattern baldness, paying to much for my ISP, incontinence, my inability to chose the right wine, cutting through beer cans with my steak knives, blemishes, snoring, an inadequate hard drive, bloating, or limp pasta.......well maybe I do regret loosing my hair...yeah that sucks. I feel guilty when I don't go to the gym. But in the plane.........the ground is so far away the rough edges of the world smooth out. Have you ever noticed how much better everything looks from the air. Even Toppenish Washington looks good from 30,000 feet. In this instance this loss of detail, the smoothing of the noise on the curve, does not produce a blandness, a "sameness". Rather, it opens an entirely new perspective where larger patterns are perceived. The Noise is on a much vaster curve now and I can perceive my existence as larger than my day to day spike on the curve. There are always new mountains to see and the straight edge of a barren banked river in eastern Washington becomes a grand and graceful curve descending from green mountains--which one tends to forget from down on the ground in Pasco.
The last full year our marriage was intact we spent in the UK, as I was working on the design for a job in Idaho from there. We flew back as a family but didn't appreciate the same patterns, I guess.
I miss my kids........these flights are like a drug and now I'm addicted.
I wish I could reach out from the plane and line up all the pieces again.
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2 comments:
may be you should not think too much about what you've done and enjoy nature just the way you do with the hawks! There is so much power and beauty in all that that you never regret anything or probably have the time for that..
thanks for visiting my blog! Hope you don't regret that! :)
No regrets. Good advice from the sky Goddess as always.
SWRDR
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