MAY 3, 2021 – The weather was gloomy—low, dark overcast, with intermittent rain—as I “flew” home from the Red Cabin early yesterday evening.
Most of the 137-mile journey over “Thoughtland” is along two-lane, rural highways through northwestern Wisconsin. I’ll say I’ve taken the trip a thousand times, just to ensure understatement of the number. Yet, I relish the trip and its duration. It’s an easy drive, devoid of heavy traffic and the frenetic speed of a divided highway. Moreover, it’s long—two hours and 40 minutes without stopping.
I used to wish I could snap my fingers and be there [or home, on the return]. When I was busy with a thousand (now overstated) things, the nearly three-hour drive to and fro’ seemed like a big waste of precious time. Plus, the trip had become all too familiar and . . . boring.
Yet, often in haste and anxiety, we don’t give the mind a chance to wander. We confine it on a short leash, made shorter by addiction to social media. Or we put the mind in a cage with familiar music, an audiobook, or radio programming. When and where does a person have the time and place in which to mull, ponder, contemplate, just plain think about stuff . . . on terrain without borders?
Of course, the car is not driving itself, and the first order of business on any road trip is reaching the destination without mishap. I accomplish this goal by pretending I’m piloting a small plane. I’ve long been an aficionado of aviation, and from watching a thousand (definitely an exaggeration, but only by a few hundred) YouTube in-the-cockpit videos and computer flight simulations, I know that flying a small aircraft is no casual matter. You have checklists for everything, and you’re constantly on alert for what’s happening around you and with the plane itself. It’s neither the time nor place to lapse into carelessness or worse—into wholesale slumber, as a neighbor of ours did once, with a very scary (but luckily, safe) outcome.
The benefit of staying awake and alert for the “flight,” is that your mind is fully aware. You’re a million miles from the Plains of Boring.
Toward the end of yesterday’s trip, I received a call from my good friend Derek, whom I met two years ago in our downtown office suite—before remote work became the rage and Derek and his girlfriend moved back to L.A. Back during the “office era” we’d enjoyed many far-ranging conversations and still do—remotely.
With my vision rotating round and round from windshield to rearview mirror to instrument panel, I let Bluetooth bring Derek into my Cessna 172. Grandson of a test pilot, Derek is a natural at the controls. He handled just fine the turbulence of thoughts I’d been collecting over the previous two hours. After landing safely and taxiing to the hangar, we hatched an idea: podcasts called, “Conversations with Eric and Derek: An Intergenerational Perspective.”
Fuel for the next flight.
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© 2021 by Eric Nilsson
