Up Up and Away

This is me, sitting on a red-eye from Portland, destination Charlotte at...well that's way too complicated a statement at this time. If you go with Portland, it's 2:30 in the morning. If you favor Charlotte as having the final say regarding what time it is, then its 5:30 am. My body doesn't really know what to think. The trip was relatively short, consisting of some 5 days to the west coast, so it goes with a more general message of telling me I'm crazy and that my neck was not created for these failed attempts at sleeping either vertically or hunched over on the tray falling from the back of the seat in front of me.  It's at times like these...be it 2:30 or 5:30 am, as I'm sitting on a red-eye, where I am slightly certain, if one can logically combine that adjective with that noun, that I'm rather dense. Insanity is, after all, repeating an action multiple times and hoping for different results, no? I consistently book red-eyes such as these, ignoring the warning built into the nomenclature, and assume that I am saving myself a day of travel by flying through the night. What I am actually doing is ensuring the fact that the following day will be experienced in a groggy, otherwise unnacceptable state. Lets be honest, flying coach for a deceiving short amount of time (leave at 10:10, arrive at 6 am doesn't seem so bad, no? Except for the fact that if you stay in one time zone, it is either 10:10 pm to 3 am, or 1:10 am to 6:00 am, and any sane individual would tell you that does not constitute a full night) in a vertical state, is not a recipe for success. Yet I am so quick to attempt it time and time again. Oh but to learn from my mistakes! I hold out hope for the future, but not much. That being said, there are some small pleasures that come from traveling through the night, chasing the dawn. One being the comical nature of seeing the large, eastern european man across the aisle from you sitting straight up, leaned forward with his forehead unabashedly pressed against the back of the seat in front of him. At that angle and position, its amazing that drool was not falling from his gaping mouth. There is also the quiet. Once you give up the futile attempts at any sort of restful sleep, there is much to appreciate in a darkened plane brimming with people, yet full of silence, devoid of any movement. There is something so amazing about the silence, at least when you don't have things you are trying to keep your mind from, that is. I had a conversation about this with a friend the other day.In those cases, you avoid the silence at all costs.In a situation where your soul is at peace, however, silence is something that is welcome, and something we don't seek out enough. For me personally, I need times such as these to make sense of all the thoughts which have been whirling around in my head, searching for some form or orientation. I feel that I cannot learn from my experiences if I don't stop to think about them, to analyze them and work through them.   Across the aisle from me, above the head of that large eastern-european, the window remains uncovered, providing a glimpse to the world outside at 40,000 feet. In this instance, the sky is awash with all the colors of the spectrum, from a deep red up to a faded seafoam blue. We are flying above a trampoline layer of fluffy clouds, colored lilac by the rising sun. One can't help but wax poetic at sights such as this. The beauty of it all is breathtaking, and it makes me appreciate the world I live in, and the creator who brought it to be. I was reading on the plane a book by John Lennox, a noted scientist and philosopher among other things, and a current professor of mathematics at Oxford University. In it he quoted Romans 1:20 which says, "For since the creation of the world God's invisible attributes-his eternal power and divine nature-have been understood and observed by what he made, so that people are without excuse." Lennox follows with the argumentation that it was a belief in theism, or an almighty and singular God who created a world of order and traceable laws, which enabled the spur of scientific discovery in the 15- and 1600s of the order of Newton, Galileo, Kepler, Pascal, to name just a few. Lennox explains it best when he writes, "At the heart of all science lies the conviction that the universe is orderly. Without this deep conviction science would not be possible." He then goes on to quote T.F. Torrence who writes, "Theology can still claim to have mothered throughout long centuries the basic beliefs and impulses which have given rise especially to modern empirical science, if only through its unflagging faith in the reliability of God the Creator and in the ultimate intelligibility of his creation." Yes, looking out that window from a machine which jettisons the skies due to its engineering in line with proven scientific laws which are constant, I am, as the Bible says, without excuse.  As I formulate these "deep thoughts" a voice comes across the loudspeaker telling us passengers that we are 80 miles from Charlotte and must now prepare for landing. All electronic devices must be powered off and traytables stowed. I will begrudgingly comply, even if I must shake my head at the usage of "stowing" one's traytable. Really? Stowing? Where am I stowing it away to? The english language has so many great words to choose from, and the airline industry overwhelmingly goes for this one to describe an action which would be much better suited with another verb. Why not "flip your traytables back up to the closed and locked position." That would be both less ridiculous and more considerate to our non-native-english-speaking friends who most definitely did not learn the verb "to stow" in any introductory, and I would go as far to say intermediate, english classes.  ...conclusion? I really need to stop booking these red-eyes.