Soul Thoughts on Flying

So, here I am in another airport. Impersonal places where we live hours of boredom, anticipation and loss. Places where everyone is in transition; from here to there. Leaving loved ones behind, going towards a new life, going home, leaving a miserable life for one full of hope. Going or coming back from yet another meeting, looking forward to a holiday break or coming back from one. Going to a lover or leaving one...Crowded places, full of people in their own cocooned world waiting for the entrance to the next step in their lives.

Soon, in an amazingly ridiculous display of trust in a tin box that floats on air, I will be above the clouds, being transported thousands of miles from where I’ve just been. Thousands of miles and thousands of experiences ahead of what I would have had to go through if I were to go by land and sea, as the old explorers and travellers used to do.  

Flying. Our bodies get frazzled…our minds get confused.  And what of our souls? Do our souls get left behind? Or do we render them in limbo in places that we loved, people we belonged with, even people we loathed and places we never fitted in?

Do we, every time we fly to new lands and new experiences, leave a bit of our essence behind? Do we lose a bit of ourselves? And if so, is it so that we can make space for new experiences and weave an extension to our soul, a new part that alters who we are and who we have been? Or does the loss leave a gap? A vacuum that can’t be filled and ultimately leaves us empty and hungry for what we were and what we could have been? 

Maybe it's none of the above. Perhaps, unlike our body and mind that hit the foggy wall of jet lag, our soul just floats in space and time unperturbed. It may just glide on the wings of time and space, unflustered. After all, it is reputed to defy death.