The View Through the Windshield

Years ago, I lived in a very small town that was trying to draw attention to its "international" airport. It was international in the sense that, several times a year, a small plane used its single runway for travel to or from Mexico. The town held an "air fair" at the airport one year to raise publicity.

Because there's not a lot to do in small towns, many people came to check out the fair, me included. And because people in small towns tend to help out their neighbors (defined in the broadest sense), I got offered a free flight at the end of the day from a friend of a friend of a friend.

He was the pilot of a small plane. And by "small," I mean that he was able to pull his plane around on the runway using one hand. That was a little alarming, but I had just watched these planes taking off and landing all day without problems, so I climbed into one of the four seats and buckled my seatbelt.

It was totally different from any of my previous trips in jets. For one thing, all the instruments were right there. I could watch for flashing red lights, listen nervously for alarms... but no signs of danger appeared. As I relaxed, my focus drifted beyond the cockpit and out through that fabulous, huge windshield. Whoa, I could see everything! I noticed details I would never see from 20,000 feet. I picked out all the local landmarks. I waved at mountain bikers winding their way along a dirt trail.

Then we banked to the left, and the mountains filled the windshield like a wall. They were 10,000 feet high, so they'd been impressive from the airport on the valley floor. But from this midair vantage point, they seemed so much bigger. They went down for thousands of feet, and they went up for thousands more. They seemed endless.

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I thought of that flight lately when I wrote about the depressive fog of TTC for so long. Somehow, looking back to see how far I've come makes the path ahead feel longer, the obstacles more daunting, not less. They block out everything else on the horizon.

In TTC news ... well, there is no news right now. Things are quiet, actually. My next cycle should start early next month.

Wouldn't it be nice to see the outcome as clearly as I saw the peaks from that airplane, or to feel the excitement and expansiveness I did that day? Instead, I'll have to stick with this grounding reminder from Anne Lamott's book Bird by Bird:

"E.L. Doctorow said once said that 'Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.' You don't have to see where you're going, you don't have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice on writing, or life, I have ever heard."