Thought Picnic: Flight from this reality

Flight now boarding

Family is a strange construct very much like choosing your seat on a multi-hop destination flight without being aware of who will be sitting next to you, if anyone will and who might be sitting elsewhere on the plane being nice or disruptive – the journey will eventually be what you make it.

Crude as it seems, the crew are usually already on-board to usher us in, there to cater to our needs and administer the necessities of order and discipline required for a smooth flight. The crew being the forebears in a manner of speaking.

As you board the first, you might be the first to take your seat or there might be others who have taken their seats before you. Once the manifest is correlated with assembled and seated passengers, the flight takes off to the next destination. It might traverse turbulence and more before it lands at the next airport.

Flight now changing

The experience is part of the journey and whilst one might converse with co-travellers in close proximity to oneself, one can be otherwise engaged in thought, in reading or some other activity.

At this stopover, passengers might embark or disembark, other seats might be left and whilst they are reassigned to others, or empty seats might be filled. Luggage unloaded and loaded on, fresh supplies brought on and waste taken away – that is the life of a flight in service.

We take-off again to a new destination learning of new arrivals, noticing them or ignoring them depending on the disposition of the moment.

The journey can be fun or a chore, breathing the shared air of depressurised cabins can have the most debilitating effects on your social interactions at certain times, but the journey must continue as the cycle of life exposes us to new knowledge, new acquaintances, new experiences and probably old memories.

Flight now rowdy

The bane of family remains one in which you have not much in terms of choice, but you can exercise a lot in terms of desire, the desire to be influenced or the desire to left alone. There are times when the latter is more than a welcome prospect, it becomes the best prospect.

We all need peace and quiet, the incessant squabbles where others are called upon not for the purpose of fresh objective eyes but to take sides in bludgeoning another just is not what many sometimes already isolated want to be engaged in.

Do we really need to talk? To be honest, we have all heard enough, if the crew will not deal with disruptive passengers, it is probably time to disembark than continue to the next destination. Find one voice of harmony to keep this journey on or I’m skipping the next leg for some sightseeing.

I’ll catch the next flight, sadly, I still can’t choose my co-travellers yet.