Window Seat, Or Dawn and Dusk From Heaven, Essay

Today as I sat silently bored, fidgeting in my thin leather seat aboard the fourth jet airliner I’d boarded in two days, I noticed something that I had forgotten. Only a slip of a thing but a thing indeed worth remembering. A thing that I had seen dozens upon dozens of times before yet no longer seemed to noticed or recognize. Like that new business or remolded building I pass each and every day on the way to work without seeing or the new hair-do or beard of a life long friend or family member I fail to discern.

What I observed, as I looked around the long tube shaped cabin, was how it was only the young people who choose a window seat and only they who looked out the windows.

It caused me to remember when I was young and had a brother and the few trips he and I took together, alone on an airplane with no adults to accompany us; flying across the country to meet little known Grandparents and our Father, to a place we’d didn’t remember and a beach we’d never seen.

I remembered the excitement and joy that we felt, the freedom and the wonder and how we bartered and argued, compromised and traded to get turns at the window seat and stare down at the earth passing by 30,000 feet beneath us; how the clouds, so high, distant and removed from the earth below seemed to form an another, endlessly wide and fathomless ocean high in the sky; an ocean turbid and vigorous with whitecaps and swells, up drafts, currents and deep dark depths all surrounded by the deep azure blue of the Sea.

I remember the sharp brightness of the sun beaming through clouds of smooth polished ivory; huge rising columns of ghostly fog sparkling and shimmering along the edge of the horizon with iridescent shafts of bold blinding white passing through the mists, long radiant extensions, as if the very fingers of God; and sunsets carefully painted with bold courageous strokes of luminous oranges and crimsons, stunning hues of brightest violets and blushing pinks all deeper and brighter, bolder and more vivid than any we had ever seen. And we marveled as they mingled and settled along the rim of the globe, glowing like hot molten lava mixed with rainbows fading slowly back into the Sea.

I suppose we forget, I know I did, what a marvel and a miracle it is to fly across the skies and to see things that only a tiny handful of humanity, by comparison, have ever seen or could have even imagined. How fortunate we are to experience such things and how beautiful and wondrous it truly is to soar in the heavens with clouds between our knees.

Like puppies we all grow older and stop chasing butterflies. We become jaded and immune to the beauty of this world and the marvels and splendor that God has placed before us. We forget, stop looking, no longer seeing or wondering or gaping in awe as once we did, as children.

So I suggest that you, as I did, forget about being among the first off the plane, put down your papers, put up your computers and turn off your IPods.

Look out the window, wonder and smile!

One hour later sitting in the middle seat of my fifth jet liner I stared across the slack young man sleeping beside me. I gazed out the small plastic window set low in the side of the plane and watched as the sun once again withdrew back from whence it came and it was truly stunning; carefully painted with bold courageous strokes of luminous oranges and crimsons, stunning hues of brightest violets and blushing pinks all deeper and brighter, bolder and more vivid than any I have ever seen. And I marveled as they mingled and settled along the rim of the globe, glowing like hot molten lava mixed with rainbows fading slowly back into the Sea.

(C) Tim Wilkinson & Wayne WIlks 2009