As you might imagine, when others talk about the gifts of cancer, after a brief moment of wanting to punch them in the nose, I merely think, ‘Sorry, buddy, but you can take that back to whatever store you bought it from.  This gift is one of which I am not worthy!’

I would rather struggle to learn how to appreciate each moment from the vantage point of someone entirely carefree when it comes to knowing what the cells in his or her body might be doing.  Yet it is a gift I have no choice in receiving; it is the feral cat continually scratching at the screen door insisting on being adopted.    There’s just no way of ignoring it.

It’s not the physical pain, at least not for me right now, that is so intolerable.  I grew up with migraines, the pain at times being great enough to bring me close to losing consciousness.   When you’ve had it before, when you know there is an endpoint, it can be tolerated.   On the other hand, when physical suffering signals a speeding up of life’s train toward the wall at the end of the tunnel, there is an added dimension of anxiety—no—terror, that does feel unbearable.

The gift of cancer is captured in the cliché that we are all on borrowed time.   Life is fleeting; it doesn’t belong to us in the sense that ultimately nothing does.   It belongs to Someone Else, someone who can be known or unknown.  We are left with the sense that the only real choice is how we want to treat this gift of impermanence, how we want to care for someone else’s possession.

There is nothing– perhaps other than the loss of a loved one, which compares with having to confront one’s own demise in setting off the alarm on the clock of  borrowed time.   The notion of living on borrowed time becomes a silent, gnawing guest that accompanies you everywhere.  The things that one momentarily feels must be done today take on both an added urgency and a subtracted urgency; does it really matter if we make the appointment with the dog groomer today or tomorrow?

But then there are the things that one momentarily feels are unnecessary but upon another moment’s reflection do matter in the light of shrinking tomorrows.   Saying “I love you” to someone in a way that is brimming with meaning and not a stale throwaway jumps to the top of the to-do list.   Apologizing for past hurts, expressing gratitude to those who are fortunate to be alive and capable of deriving meaning from our words; these acts become the new markers for borrowed time well spent.

Certainly, time will be spent whether it is borrowed or owned.  Most of us live as if we owned it.   We control what we do with it in whatever determined way we choose to, we respect it or disrespect it, value it or not, because it is ours and not someone else’s.   But if we lived differently, with a sharp awareness that our time on earth is lent to us by someone who might choose to underhandedly take it back, how might our lives change?

That is not to say that all of us treat that which we do borrow as precious.  One can certainly abuse someone else’s goods, and one can also abuse someone else’s time, even when graciously lent.  But doing so, I daresay, reflects poorly on our own dignity.   It wears away on whatever soul we may have.

There can even be disputes among people regarding what is lent and what is given, what is owned and borrowed.   But there can be no dispute about the ultimate end of our lives and the ultimate limit on the time that beats through them.   We have no choice about when we enter this world, and with the exception of suicide, no choice about when we leave it.   Our only choices are how to spend that which is preciously short.  So we are all on borrowed time, like it or not.   Whether you manage to measure that time in dollars, days, months, years or minutes, it is not ours to keep.  Spend it well.

–I wrote the bulk of the following post before my cancer diagnosis and the experience of chemotherapy and radiation.   Had I done so afterward, it might have been entirely different.   More on that below:

Some aviation phrases are just so damn beautiful that the great bard of San Francisco, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, actually named a book of poetry after one of them.  “Time of Useful Consciousness,” is the aviation term that refers to the length of time a person has to make decisions once deprived of oxygen (such as a sudden loss of cabin pressure).

An airplane can de-pressurize due to a number of reasons, the most common one being some kind of malfunction in the pressurization system itself.  But if a passenger manages to wrangle a door open (impossible in an airborne airliner but easy in a small plane), or the hull of an airplane is breached, or the windshield in the cockpit gets smashed to bits by a flock of fat geese, the cabin’s air rushes out the hole and is eventually replaced by the freezing air outside.   But the cold isn’t what gets you.  It is the fact that there is very little oxygen at the altitudes where most metal birds fly.

I have had an almost lifelong case of chronic fatigue syndrome, which I am not using your valuable time of useful consciousness to complain about.  Often, my chronic fatigue severely limits my time of useful consciousness (which I will heretofore abbreviate as TOUC, in order for you to maximize your own TOUC).  I am pretty worthless on any day prior to 11am, and even then you may find me wandering aimlessly wondering where I am and what I am supposed to be doing.  Waking up is something I rarely do completely, unless I have to do something like fly an airplane or take a test, although I have been known to do the latter half asleep (often, actually).

Clearly, I am conscious from the moment I wake up, but throughout the day if my consciousness were soil there would be very little that could grow in it.  I do have bursts of lucidity, which I have learned to treasure when they come.   They remind me that while my body aches I am not yet brain-dead, which is a delightful thought.  Typically, it is in these little microbursts that I get the most work done.

One key I have found is to know what kind of work I can do under which physical circumstance.   If I am studying something that I want to remember, I must do it caffeinated and in a moment of UC.  There are times that I am fairly confident will not be useful, and they typically come around 3 or 4 in the afternoon.   When I used to spend whole days seeing one client after another, I eventually stopped scheduling clients at 4pm.   At first I thought that if I scheduled a manic client, or someone with a severe case of optimism, I could get away with it, but that didn’t work either.  I tried meditating at 4 for a while, which was good, or occasionally napping, which was awesome, but I always had to re-caffeinate and wash my face with cold water before seeing my 5 o’clock.

Making consciousness useful, it seems, is largely about knowing when it is necessary to don the oxygen mask.  Sometimes the oxygen mask is a cup of coffee, sometimes it is a nap.   For some lucky folks it is exercise, although for those with chronic fatigue that rarely works.

By the way, the actual time of useful consciousness depends on how high you are flying.     At 40,000 feet, roughly the altitude most airliners fly, you will have only 15 to 20 seconds before you pass out.   That is why pilots are trained to grab their oxygen masks as the very first thing on their checklist.   But, if your door happens to open in a small, pressurized airplane humming along at about 20,000 feet, you will have about 5 to 10 minutes before your luck runs out.   And, if you are flying in a small, unpressurized airplane at about 10,000 feet, you will likely be fine for at least a half an hour.

–The experience of cancer and its treatment has changed my perspective on useful consciousness.   More than ever, it has become necessary to carefully tune to the body’s signals. There is only a small window in which one can push past the fog before doing so leads to a deterioration of function.  “Chemo brain” is a real side effect of chemotherapy, although I have never attempted to learn the physiological explanation.   One is awake, but in a perennial haze.   Memory deteriorates—especially short-term memory, as does comprehension.   It is like losing 20 IQ points or more.  

I am up in the air again, and if you will pardon the silly pun, it is heavenly.   I am not at the controls of my own little four-seat airplane, but in the cabin of an Alitalia triple-seven, on my way from the asphalt of Los Angeles to whatever will greet me in northeastern Italy.

I do love to fly, and perhaps while I am in the afterglow of a doctor’s appointment in which I was told that my cancer is no longer visible to either Dr. Pet or her adorable sister Dr. Cat, I can appreciate even more than ever the miracle of engineering that pushes me against the jetstream and carries me at nearly the speed of sound six miles into the air, past continents and over oceans to the opposite ends of the earth.

The pleasure of riding high above the clouds eastward into the night is made possible by a strange construct that others have called remission.   It is a word I dare not utter aloud lest I tempt the ears of fate who have, with intention or not, granted me this status.   It is, by its very nature, a temporary state, with no clear expiration date, but with a certain one nevertheless.

Typically, my wife and I spend the month of August in Northern California.   But it was there that my first overt signs of cancer emerged a year ago, and it was there that each passing year brought with it increasingly severe allergic reactions.    As is so often the case, half of the people we consulted recommended going up north regardless of a compromised immune system, and the other half recommended staying away.   We opted for a safer path, but while I am just now fit enough to travel, we decided to travel to a place where we had never been, a place where new allergies will not have had the time to develop.

The nurse practitioner in my last visit to the medical oncologist uttered the word for the first time, and she said it in a way that made the depth of its meaning clear.  “While you are in remission…” was how she began the sentence.   The very usage of the term highlighted its temporary nature.   I imagine a police officer pulling me over and demanding that I pay the fine for speeding now, “while I am Denver,” because clearly, if he had anything to do with it, I won’t be there for too long.

To be remiss is to be careless, negligent. I would be remiss, they say, not to tell you something.   But the word, as pejorative as I might be inclined to see it, is also hopeful.   The cancer, for now, is hiding.   It is careless; it is negligent in its duty to destroy.

But while the cancer may be in remission, I am determined not to be.   Whatever it is that we make of our lives, it is nothing if not precious.   This is no news flash to anyone who has made it past adolescence, but those of us who have been fortunate enough to hear words similar to those uttered to me by the nurse practitioner perhaps have a deeper appreciation.   None of us get out of this game alive, for sure, and none of us know how much life awaits us, or even how much strength we might have to meet it.   I may never step foot in my own airplane again, or hear the gentle whoosh of the giant engines propelling me through the sky again, but for now, for this very moment, I am up in the air, and while flying at 35 thousand feet is not exactly heaven on earth, it is heavenly nevertheless.

I subscribe to four or five aviation magazines, and my favorite articles are typically the accident reports.  I don’t think this is because I am excessively morbid (although I do have my share of that).  Most pilots I know read them, because whenever I bring up a particular crash with other pilots they seem to know as much or more about it than I do.

Pilots study accident reports primarily for the obvious reason that it is considerably better to learn from someone else’s mistakes than your own.  But there is much more to it than that.

I also think that pilots read accident reports for the same reason adults read morbid fairy tales to children.   G.K. Chesterton, who GB Shaw called a “colossal genius,” said famously, “Fairy tales do not tell children that dragons exist.  Children already know that dragons exist.  Fairy tales tell children that the dragons can be killed.”    In that sense, they give us all a sense of mastery, a way of knowing that our adversaries can be defeated.

Fairy tales typically involve some character defeating a foe through cleverness, courage, or other attributes that we want to transmit to our children.   While some accident reports end up with the pilots and passengers walking away from their planes none the worse for wear, many of them don’t, and yet as we read them we imagine what we could or should have done differently in the same situation.

That is one way accident reports, similar to fairy tales, build resiliency.   It takes a certain amount of courage (if not ignorance) to step into an airplane just after having read how someone your age with your number of hours in your type of airplane inadvertently killed him or herself.

When pilots read accident reports, they typically do so with mixed emotions.   There is often anger involved: how could you be so stupid and incompetent to do such a thing to your self, your passengers, and your loved ones?   But there is also compassion, in that there but for the grace of God go all of us.

Accident reports also invite the guest of grief.  On that subject, another initialed Brit, CS Lewis, said “I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.”  Lewis was Irish of course, which explains much of that viewpoint.   Grief, when it doesn’t become indulgent, eventually becomes sweet as it sets the table for the gift of renewal.

And while it is certainly true that life itself inevitably gives us plenty of opportunity to grieve, the ability to cry out loud and express grief fearlessly under the right circumstances keeps us from transforming grief into depression.

Just like fairy tales, accident reports teach pilots how to handle potential problems (typically by understanding what NOT to do), help pilots build resiliency, teach us critical problem-solving skills, and sometimes even reinforce moral lessons (such as the question of taking a passenger along on a potentially dangerous flight.)

Perhaps this is why, when sitting for long bouts of chemotherapy, I was comforted by my wife reading me accident reports.  She could just as well have read me adventures of pilots ferrying airplanes over Africa, but what I wanted to hear most were the accident reports.  Surely, I was already in the middle of my own ordeal, one that I felt as though I could not control.   Yet, imagining disastrous situations faced by others and how best to respond may have given me a slight taste of mastery in a situation where I had none.

I can assure you, dragons really do exist.   And when they come, it is possible that no amount of preparation will help.  But in the situations where one does retain bits of control, the Boy Scouts and Chesterton had it right.   It’s good to be prepared.

Photo by Nomi Morris

The other day I took the short drive from my house to my hangar, just 15 minutes away.   There I visited my lonely airplane, which has not flown now for about six months, since I received the cancer diagnosis.   I found myself again admiring its smooth lines, and I actually found myself tenderly stroking the side of the plane and gently tapping on the cowling as if I were petting a peacefully snoozing dog.

How girls and boys can fall in love with their toys!    I guess by falling in love with our inanimate beasts we are more likely to give them the care and attention they need to perform their functions safely.   And in the case of big toys such as boats and airplanes, their ability to function safely equates to the safety of their drivers and passengers.

Many of us who are fortunate enough to own big toys give them names just to further our anthropomorphic tendencies.  I have toyed with various names for my airplane, but none of them have stuck.  Of course all airplanes have to be registered, and therefore they all carry a number, a “call sign” used by controllers and pilots to identify themselves.   As with car license plates, airplane owners have the ability to customize their numbers, and in my vanity I wanted the big letters on the side of my airplane to spell my name.   The letter “I” is forbidden, however, given its potential confusion with the number 1.   “1RA” and various prefixes and suffixes were all taken, so I appended the numbers “44” in front of “1RA” simply because it wasn’t already spoken for, and thus my airplane officially became known as “Four Four One Romeo Alpha”.   Now, as long as there isn’t another One Romeo Alpha flying nearby (there actually has been on a few occasions) it is permissible to abbreviate one’s registration number (as long as the full number has already been acknowledged), so when speaking to controllers on the radio it is common for me to refer to my airplane simply as “one romeo alpha.”   The problem of course with this is that those listening in can think that I am being a bit more narcissistic than I really am.   I may consider myself an alpha male, but I certainly am no romeo.

Given that I am often referring to my airplane as One Romeo Alpha, and in that sense it already has a name, I am less inclined to name it Sharon, Rosie, or Enola Gay.  If, however, you happen to be on familiar terms with Diamond’s handsomely sculpted DA-40, I am open to suggestions.

Now, the FAA requires a medical evaluation for all pilots over 40 every two years, and my medical became due just as I was in the middle of my cancer treatment.   It doesn’t matter, because I am too fatigued to fly anyway, and would have grounded myself even if the FAA rules didn’t force it.   But on good days I can make it safely to my local airport, where I can admire the sexy lines of my Diamond DA-40, and then sit on a bench and watch the healthier pilots gracefully turn final and plant their wheels on terra firma.   I can envy their finesse, and wistfully dare to hope, if only for a brief moment, to join them in the sky some day.  I guess we all will, one way or another.

On the way home from the hospital after receiving radiation on Christmas eve, my wife and I listened to a short podcast, a “dharma talk” emanating from the Upaya retreat center, where my wife has spent a couple of retreats.

I chose that talk because of the title–“Appreciation Density,” which struck me.  Pilots use the word “density” a lot, typically in reference to the quality of the air their engines breathe.  Air density is a big deal, because it determines the capabilities of the airplane and such critical things as the ability to climb, airspeed, and the distance needed to land and depart.   At high altitude airports, where the air is thinner, “density altitude” is so critical that automated systems make it part of the routine information given to pilots.

Generally speaking, airplanes fly better when the air is dense, that is, when more molecules are crammed closer together.   Heat causes the molecules to expand, creating fewer of them in a particular space, so heat generally makes an airplane fly poorer.   Humidity has a similar effect, as does altitude (the farther away from the earth the thinner the atmosphere gets).   So pilots often say “hot, humid and high” work against us when it comes to air density.

I miss flying.   I miss the feel of the stick in one hand and the throttle in the other.   I miss pushing on a rudder pedal, easing the stick and feeling the weight of the airplane shift as it carves a circle in the sky.  I also miss the taste of food, and the ease of swallowing.   I miss the strength in my body.  But none of those things are available to me now, and, as Peter Noone of Herman’s Hermits profoundly said, “It ain’t no use to pine.”

In fact, as the Upaya podcast reminded me, perhaps the only density that ultimately matters is “appreciation density.”   I have no idea how to define this from a Buddhist perspective.  The message, however, is simple: How deeply can one appreciate what one already has, the small miracles that are all around us?

In the last couple of months, I have been struggling to redefine the mask that I wear during radiation that pins me down like a butterfly on display from something that is choking me and threatening to cause me to aspirate on my own vomit to something that is there to heal me.   I have imagined the mask as a soothing hot towel, or a healing scarf, in order to turn my fear into something positive.

In a similar vein, I have also come to appreciate NOT flying.   It teaches me to value the time I have flown, or possibly can fly again.   It teaches me to appreciate the events that have filled in the spaces where flying used to be.  It teaches me to spend time honoring those instructors who have taught me some of the tricks of the trade.

One of the lessons learned from the tribulations of cancer and its treatment is that one of my key tasks is to increase the “density” of my appreciation.   I do deeply appreciate those whose prayers have traveled into the universe and landed my way.  I appreciate the kind and loving thoughts, and the incredible dedication of my family and friends who have fed and supported me.  I also am learning how to appreciate the small miracles around me.

There was a line in the podcast where the person speaking mentioned that, while indeed it is a miracle to win the lottery, it is even a bigger miracle to buy a lottery ticket, and perhaps even a bigger miracle to lose.   I smiled through my swollen cheeks because it rang so true.   It is a wondrous thing indeed to be able to buy a lottery ticket, to participate in any way in this gift that is life.   Every breath we get to breathe is indeed a miracle.   To find deep appreciation in small things is to increase our “appreciation density,” and the denser our appreciation, the better we fly.

Life as a pilot begins with a relationship between the student and the instructor.   The first and perhaps biggest milestone in the training relationship comes when the instructor, in his or her wisdom, decides that the student is capable of flying solo.  It is such an important milestone that there is even a ritual attached to it, although sadly for some reason my curmudgeonly instructor did not bother to put me through it.   Following a student pilot’s first solo flight, the pilot is initiated into the club by the instructor tearing or cutting off a piece of the student pilot’s shirt.

I had no idea where the tradition emanated from, and when I asked around no one else seemed to know.   According to Wikipedia, “In the days of tandem trainers, the student sat in the front seat, with the instructor behind.  As there were often no radios in these early days of aviation, the instructor would tug on the student pilot’s shirttail to get his attention, and then yell in his ear.  A successful first solo flight is an indication that the student can fly without the instructor…Hence, there is no longer a need for the shirt tail, and it is cut off by the (often) proud instructor, and sometimes displayed as a trophy.”

I remember my first solo well, although it is now about a dozen years ago.  At the time, I felt as though it was long overdue, which I suppose is a much better feeling than if I felt it was premature.   It seemed a bit like a non-event; possibly because I didn’t know in advance it was coming and had no time to worry about it.  I had my usual lesson, but on that particular day, my instructor told me to taxi to a particular area and drop him off.   He then told me to do 3 circuits around the pattern, landing each time, and that he would be watching from the field.   I performed fine, but there was no celebration, barely an indication that I had accomplished anything, other than that the flight school secretary grabbed her camera and had me pose in front of the airplane with my instructor.

The legal ability to fly solo before even being granted a pilot’s license is, in fact, a profound triumph.   It is symbolic of leaving home, leaving the safety net of having someone beside you who can support you when times get rough.

Since that day, well over a decade ago, I must admit that I prefer flying with a co-pilot.   Even if the co-pilot isn’t a certified pilot, it feels safer to know that there is someone in the right seat who could offer me an additional set of eyes and ears, and even take control of the airplane should I have my first epileptic seizure.

But I also simply love the company, love to share the joy of flight, love to offer someone else the thrill of lifting off in a small aircraft, enjoying the scenery at 10,000 feet, and returning safely to earth.   Sharing the experience of flying with another makes it more of an adventure, the way sharing any experience with another human being does.

I think about marriage in many of the same ways I think about flying.    The mythologist Joseph Campbell said it best:

 “I think one of the problems in marriage is that people don’t realize what it is.   They think it’s a long love affair, and it isn’t.  Marriage has nothing to do with being happy.  It has to do with being transformed, and when the transformation is realized it is a magnificent experience.  You have to submit.  You have to yield.  You have to give.  You can’t just dictate.”

And so it is for me with flying.   It is not about being happy.   It is too trite and inaccurate to say that I am happy when I fly.   But to yield to it, to give to it, to not dictate but to manage the occasional tumultuous skies, and to engage in the sensations that only flying can bring, can be truly transformative.

Fortunately, one doesn’t need to know how an internal combustion engine works in order to drive a car, and one doesn’t really need to understand the Bernoulli principle to fly an airplane.   But it is important to know some simple, basic, fundamental facts of physics.  One of those is that, if you want to leave the surly bounds of earth’s gravitational pull, or at least resist it long enough to become airborne, weight is your enemy.   Something having to do with Newton’s law, I think, or fruit trees.

Losing weight in an airplane is a fairly simple task.   Pilots are trained to calculate weight and centers of gravity in order to know what their airplane is capable of doing and not doing.  They simply have to do the calculations, and then make the rather black or white decision to remove the weight, shift it, or stay home.

For humans, however, excessive weight may feel like extra baggage but removing it presents a more substantial problem.   An overloaded airplane may make it off the ground, but it will have difficulty climbing over the tree near the end of the runway or turning away from it on time.   Demise will come quickly.

Humans know that they can get away with carrying extra weight for quite some time before diabetes or some other weight-related problem arises.   And as long as there are no trees that need to be climbed on the way to work, the smell of that newly baked chocolate chip cookie is so appealing in the moment that it is just too hard to resist the sugar fix.

The problem with diets and with losing weight in general is that most humans know very well what is required to solve the problem.   Typically it means choosing to eat less, and sometimes it means choosing to eat certain foods rather than others.

As a psychologist who has seen scores if not hundreds of clients over the years who were concerned about their weight, I can assure you that when it comes to overeating, we have theories ranging from serotonergic deficiency to oral fixation, and most of our theories do as much good at helping people lose weight as a piece of strawberry shortcake.

Some historians of psychotherapy have noted that the concept of willpower has gone out of fashion and pretty much stayed out of fashion since Freud posited that most problems stemmed from unconscious conflicts.    It is a shame, because the concept of will, however flawed as a construct, can be very useful when struggling with habits.  Whether stuffing extra weight onto your airplane because either the passenger or her suitcase weighs more than you anticipated, or stuffing chocolate mousse into your mouth because, well, that is where it belongs, the ultimate decision is driven by the will to live a healthy, long life.

But as any connoisseur of the human body can tell you, it is rarely weight unto itself that is the problem.   There are, ahem, many airframes designed to carry a lot of weight.  The problem in that case, to borrow a business metaphor, isn’t sales but distribution.

When I asked my trainer once what the best way of losing my protruding belly was, he replied that at some point (meaning my age?) the only way to make a belly look smaller is to make one’s chest larger.  Other than the fleeting thought that I may be paying my trainer too much, I considered that he might be right about that, and that weight alone wasn’t as critical as where it is located.

Thinking of yourself as an airplane could be dangerous if you are anywhere near an 80-foot bluff overlooking the ocean, as I am fortunate to be as I am writing this.  But if you do, try the exercise of thinking of that sandwich as adding an extra suitcase, because it will probably end up on the rear of that airframe of yours.  Then make the executive pilot decision to politely and respectfully let someone else crash and burn.

—This post was written in August, 2015, a month or so before I knew of my cancer diagnosis.  Having throat cancer, as well as surviving the chemotherapy and radiation adds an entirely new dimension to weight loss.   Due to the cancer, I have lost about 80% of my sense of taste, and it is difficult to swallow.  Yet, the radiation oncologist insists that those who maintain their weight through radiation stand a better chance of survival.  There are very things one can control during the intensive treatment regime I am under, so I struggle to use the little willpower I have left to eat.  

Costello:   Well then, who’s on first?

Abbott:  Yes.

One thing that has always confused me about the way aviators use words is the fact that, in aviation, the word “ceiling” refers to the bottom of a cloud.   The bottom of a cloud, of course, creates a ceiling for what is visible beneath it, but if you are in the cloud itself or flying above it, the ceiling is actually the floor, or the bottom of the cloud.

Similarly, the word “top” typically refers to clouds, so the “top” of the cloud is actually the “ceiling” of the cloud, but you are not allowed to say that, lest you confuse the word by taking it out of its proper context.   Now pay attention.  The top of the cloud, of course, looks very much like a floor if you are flying above it, but to call it that would confuse the word “floor” because that word also has a special meaning in aviation; it refers to the bottom of the kind of airspace you may be flying through.  That floor, by the way, is often hundreds of feet above the ground.

Just in case you are having trouble following, the point here is that assuming anything is what it appears to be can get you in trouble.  Paul Simon tries to make that clear, but fails almost as much as I do, in his classic song “One Man’s Ceiling is Another Man’s Floor.”   There are mysterious things going on in the lobby and in the alleyway, and eventually someone calls his name, and we are warned to remember that one man’s ceiling is another man’s floor.   But it’s a great song anyway.

Maybe I should say it like this:  Have you ever been down so low that the bottom looks like up?   Have you ever walked up the down staircase?  Or for fans of Screaming Yellow Zonkers (google it), do you walk to school or carry your lunch?

More to the point, have you ever walked into a bar, eyed a beautiful single woman sitting alone, start to walk toward her and then see the guy she was with pop out of nowhere (probably the bathroom)?  I haven’t either, but I saw it on TV.

Here’s what I am saying.   There are people who grow up in New York City and never even think about a piano falling on top of them because they are so worried about stepping in dog poop that they never look up.

More to the point, Lenny Bruce used to say that he didn’t believe in heaven and hell because heaven was supposed to be “up there” and hell was “down there,” but if the earth revolves then if it was 2:00 in the afternoon and hell was down then when it was 2 in the morning hell would be up.   I confess that I too have gotten heaven and hell mixed up a few times in my life, but that’s entirely another story.  Or two.

Pilots go up and down the same way people do in big office buildings, which is to say they use their elevators.   While airplanes with autopilots actually do use buttons, most of the time pilots go up and down by pushing forward (trees get bigger) or pulling backward (trees get smaller).   Sometimes when I am driving a car my assumptions get in the way.  Because of my short arms, I do like to adjust the steering wheel distance, and whenever I pull the wheel toward me I can’t help but think the front of the car is going to start pointing upward and I better push the wheel forward so that the car stays on the ground.   I am always surprised when the steering wheel moves back and forth and the car stays on the ground.

It is easy to forget that one man’s ceiling is another man’s floor if we get too stuck obsessing that our world is the whole world.   It comes with the territory of assuming anything too much.   I see it when white guys try to act like black guys around black guys because they think they are being cool but are really assuming that a black guy actually acts like a black guy.   Or, when looking into a baby’s rocker and speaking “baby talk” to babies I can’t help but think the baby is thinking that this adult person must have misplaced his own rocker.

I have yet to fly aerobatically because even the thought of a roller coaster makes me nauseous, but I imagine aerobatic pilots know better than anyone (except maybe scuba divers) that what appears up for one second will be down the next.   Clearly, the bottom of a cloud (its floor) paints a ceiling for the clear sky beneath it.  But if we always have our feet on earth we will never even think about that, and leave ourselves vulnerable for things falling from the sky.  And the last thing we would want is to be hit over the head by our own expectations.

–Written August, 2015, before “chemo-brain,” although it sure sounds like the fog had already come in.