Metal wing in the rain
A brief trip to outside of my mind
Stormy Monday night, somewhere on the Californian sky.
I looked through the glass from my plane window seat, seeing the East Bay coming in and out of view. The city was shimmering below, the street lights shining like iridescent veins, the whole scene becoming a living organism.
Outside, I saw the airplane wing dribbled with rain droplets, as if this metal body is receiving an eternal caressing of the sky. It must have been hundreds of mile per hour there. I imagine myself getting into whirling fans, being smashed, cut, dismembered. A sudden shrug followed by a release in my body: out of the many ways to die, the prospect of such a tragic death is somehow comforting.
For a moment, I had a strange out-of-mind experience, completely taken out of my day to day concerns — who to meet, what to do — and transported into a different realm. Imagine the absurdity of a human contemplating endless rain on metal IN THE SKY.
It’s one thing to marvel at this amazing technological bird-in-the-sky feat. It’s another thing to be inside it being mesmerized by the rain — the ever present nature — falling on this metal wing — a manifestation of human dream of reaching heaven, of freedom.
Moments like this help me go beyond the usual man vs nature story. It’s tempting to tell common stories like humans destroying the environment, or nature throwing wrath at ungrateful human rascals. But who is telling those stories? Am I the plane? The wind? The droplet? The shimmering city below?
The flight was delayed for three hours and was stuck for a while even as it landed at the airport. The flight captain announced “We are so sorry for the disaster. Nature is not liking us these days”.
The storm sure must have caused a lot of economic damage in terms of time wasted and lots of psychological one too. I did get nervous at time, thinking about a family dinner already waiting on the ground. Yet for a while, the pleasure of being irresponsible was undeniable: while everyone else was worrying, I was secretly marveling at this whole scene.
Humans are not good at getting out of their own minds, let alone imagine and uphold multiple perspectives in their heads. It’s a rare ability, one that I’ve found a good use for. In times of distress, it may help to re-enter the meaningless void and realize that nothing has matter at all. Existential crisis is not a bug but a feature of the human mind, so we may as well cultivate a healthy appreciation for it.
Maybe I’ll facilitate such a course one day, but for now, I’m glad to share with you the invisible joy in the visible-but-often-unseen realm of rain on metal wing.
