Up in the Air
Perspectives at 30,000 feet
Photo by Ilene Bergelson
Up in the air. That is literally and figuratively where I’m sitting in this moment as I write this. I’m on a plane, west coast bound, for the 2023 Presentation Summit, a gathering of specialists devoted to the art and technical prowess of presenting. The clouds are exquisite from this angle. I get to see them hover over the land below. They are sundrenched. When I look out, instead of down, they look like the softest road to heaven. Like a carpet, made of infinite tufts of highly fluffed cotton, warmed by the sun. Yet, if I look at them long enough, I can also see the very same clouds as if they were an endless snowy landscape that I’d find thousands of feet below.
Clouds are amorphous like that. There is just something about them and their enigmatic nature.
On this trip, I’m up in the clouds in more ways than one. While literally 30k+ feet high, figuratively, I feel a bit ensconced in a fog, just like when flying into a cloud. Disoriented, taking in the mystery of the past two weeks, I’m trying to get a read on where I am in all that is happening.
A colleague, halfway across the world, was struggling. She’d said as much in an email to me and we messaged back and forth over the next few days. By the weekend, she had decided to leave this world of her own accord. I found out only after her body had been discovered. She’d been a ray of light to many, teaching people far and wide about imagining possibilities and seeing what opens for us in life when we do just that.
I don’t wrestle with how someone who can tap into positivity the way she did can also choose to end her life. The paradox is more than believable to me: it is part of what it is to be human. We are not one thing. We are everything. And so is everyone else.
The “everythingness” that makes it possible for a person to guide positivity in some moments and choose to end one’s life in other moments can be hard to reconcile. Everythingness is messy. It isn’t easy to see, and it doesn’t make sense. Sometimes these parts of us are so obscured, we can mislead ourselves in thinking they aren’t present in us at all. So convincing is the picture we do see, that we take it for the entirety of what exists. I don’t know whether my colleague saw an impenetrable fog when she searched for solace while in the depths of her despair. I only know the choice she made as she was trying to find a way forward. I accept that I’ll never know the rest.
Less than a week after her passing, Hamas attacked Israel with a brutality that defies description, leading to warfare, pain, and the death of many Israelis and Palestinians… which brings us to where I am now, up among my cumulus companions, wondering what is what and where we go from here. Such different ways we have of seeing each other and this world… it’s dizzying. Is there a place beyond the haze, beyond the disorienting and different interpretations of what we see, where a shared reality is possible? Some say no. Or they say, “not anymore.”
How do we handle our sorrow, our anger, our feelings of powerlessness or despair? When we look at clouds do we see fluffy carpets, frosty snowdrifts, walls that block out everything else, or something else entirely? Do we look and forget about the clouds’ inherent, enigmatic nature and what is beyond them? Do we look at ourselves and each other and forget about our own enigmatic natures? In these moments, does our confusion and despair lead us to beliefs and actions we would not choose otherwise?
At this moment, I have more questions than answers. Many more. And that seems about right, given the circumstances. I don’t have the privilege of having my feet on the ground right now. It is literally impossible at this moment. I’m up in the air. But I can center myself here, in this nebulous place, to the best of my ability. And I can keep re-centering, because I am in motion, just like we all are.
Take a beat.
Take a breath.
What is possible?