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The Spirit of Flying

Mission completion (this is America English)… my projects have come to an end. Now going philosophical…

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Flying is like no other things on earth. Ice-skating is close but not as spiritually uplifting. Car racing is close but not as freely manoeuvring. Kayaking and rafting are close but certainly not as visually unfolding.

Fly high up and you command totally unfamiliar perspectives to things around you. Trees become tiny green spots. Houses turn into a motley colour of shapes. Cars go like snails on a pilgrimage to nowhere. Coastlines and waves form white rippling links across a gigantic fluidic mirror.

Up there you worry about how you fare your life no more. You grieve over your failures no more. You rant your anger no more; after all you have no audience up there apart from birds. All you can do is to beam them smiles.

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And you start to wonder if there has ever been a different perspective occurred to you to see this world differently. Birth, schooling, work, making money, marriage, giving birth, falling ill, raising children, work, falling ill, retiring, dying. So you will end up down there, six feet under.

You will be physically dissipated, alive only in memories. And there will be a day people decide to be almost totally oblivious to you. You become a bare name, which will sound very distant to many as if you had never lived here on earth.

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A pessimistic person looks life really like a dusty corridor, shut at both ends. Life comes across him or her as a passage along one damned thing after another. He believes in coming from nowhere before, going to nowhere after, like a snail goes on a pilgrimage to nowhere. She thinks life inches towards death ever since its birth. And at the farthest end of the corridor, there is just, rightly or wrongly, a full stop for him and her.

If that's more or less your case, flying endows you with the power to see in a new way what you are so used to. Physically flying. Spiritually flying. And when we descend on the solid earth, you will live like no other day in the past you have had. After all, you have seen that the car is actually going on a road leading to a destination.

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