Airplane musings
Airplane trips are disorienting, quite. They drop your time on the floor and muck it up with dirt and lint and things you can’t even recognize. And they shuffle you past crowds of people you can’t ignore. Not like the commute, not like the city, but these people are in the same disorienting shuffle you’re locked into. You sit next to them, you live their lives with the delays, the coffee served, the boarding passes. Who are they, anyhow?
I’ll be in Bryn Athyn for five days. I haven’t thought the least bit about this trip. Los Angeles has been an enveloping experience, soaking up my mind and leaving little space for contemplating life outside the circumstance. And now I’m off to see old friends and old memories. Bryn Athyn is always something of a checkpoint for me; I note how I’ve changed and progressed in the differences in my interactions with friends and acquaintances seen only intermittently. It’s a status check. A checkpoint against memories and morals and idealized visions of the future. So I can see how I’m doing? How am I doing, anyhow?
It was just a few months ago that I was in limbo. Now my life is busy, but do I have purpose? I have tasks, but do I have direction? And will I find it writing nebulous entries on a weblog? Probably not.
It was just a few months ago that I wanted to be a minister. Now I’m some sort of business guy. Or a technology guy. (I don’t like to be too precise about these things.) What do I want long-term? People ask me where I want to be in five years. People ask me where I want to be in ten years. People ask me what I’d be doing if money weren’t a concern. These questions are unanswerable—completely and utterly. That makes me sound disorganized and listless, I know, but I prefer to think of it as “living in the short-term.” That’s not necessarily a bad thing, I know, but boy it takes some adjusting.