I thought, “My plane is going to crash”

Last week when I published the blog, I talked a lot about the four noble truths. The path that one takes to lessen the suffering in their life. Then I published late this week, which bothers me more than you know,. It usually comes out on Friday. This time it wasn’t until Saturday, and it wasn’t exactly the way I wanted it to be. I like things very routine, I like lists, and I know I’ve talked about how much I like things to be right in the place I need them to be. I have a tinge of OCD so when things get out of line, it affects me and causes me to become irrational, dissatisfied and just overall, I usually have a bad attitude. The fact is is, that’s not really me. I like for things to go smoothly, I want to be calm and be able to react to any type of change in a way that doesn’t further stress me out.

When I was stuck in the airport at DIA for about 19 hours straight, I had already been in another airport for 7 1/2 hours waiting. Period. You could say I was pretty damn irritated. I felt like it was happening to only me, as if I was terminally unique in my suffering. I felt like there was nothing that was gonna be done to be able to satisfy me, and that I deserved precedence to everyone else. When, in fact, everyone else was probably going through exactly what I was going through in my head, if not worse.

After I got off the plane and realized that I missed my connecting flight to Portland, I begin to go through the stages of grief in my head. I was angry, I was in denial for sure. At one point I was convinced that I was going to offer some grandiose amount of money to get on a plane and be somewhere in a short amount of time. Like my money was going to make the weather change or some bullshit like that. I made a few phone calls, I got pretty damn emotional I felt hopeless. I thought I was going to be stuck in the airport, like the movie terminal, with Tom Hanks. This is because my mind always goes to the negative on its own.

As humans we have fear. Fear is an important emotion and feeling, we need fear to protect us from things like bears, fires, or any other type of attacks that could harm us as people, or harm the people/ pets that we love the most. However, fear can also lead to many irrational thoughts, intrusive mind processes, and all-around disarray that creates malcontent, not only in ourselves, but that shit bleeds out into everything around us. A very close friend of mine told me once a really good acronym for fear.:

F-False

E-Evidence

A-Appearing

R-Real

The story goes like this, imagine being in your kitchen. You’re washing the dishes and you hear a noise. Immediately you think “what the f*!k was that?”

And then the brain starts to roll, it starts to create things that aren’t really there, so you go and get your golf club or your baseball bat or a knife from the kitchen thinking something is out there. You hear another noise, this time it was louder. As a person in fear our body does things, our heart rate speeds up, our limbs start to get colder… because all of our blood rushes to the center of our body. We start to sweat our eyes dilate to let more light in…You see the picture I am printing?

So, then you go into the garage and grab a flashlight, and here you are in your backyard with a flashlight and weapon of choice, prepared to conquer the assailant.

Next, you turn the flashlight on and shine it, where you heard the noise, only to find a possum and its babies. I know that I’m one of the few people that think that possum are cute, however, the point of the story is it that it wasn’t anything that was going to hurt you or anyone else. This type of fear is what creates the chaos in our brains. Is it important to have fear of course, but to let it run, your life or mind is some thing that I have fought for many years. It has plagued me overtime. It has kept me from doing a lot of things I love.

In this instance, fear is conquered by the emotion of say, seeing how cute the possum are, or realizing that it wasn’t anything trying to harm you at all . Yet when we get into the fear that I had when I was on the airplane in the air, it was a completely different type of fear. this is when I went into my brain when I was on the plane. I asked myself a couple questions.

1. West am I most afraid of in this moment?

2. Is there anything I can do to control this situation, or help it?

3. What can I do to help myself and others?

4. How did I get caught up in thinking that this world NEVER happen to me?

when I started to ask myself these questions, I realized how much my brain was connected to my base of faith. When I first started studying and researching Buddhist culture, I was taking classes to get my yoga certification, shortly after that, I took refuge in Buddhism. The first things I really learned about it was the fact that as humans and entities on this planet in life suffer. I was definitely suffering in this moment, on the plane, my hands were on the armrest, squeezing them as tight as I could. I was breathing shallow, I really had tears in my eyes because for moments, especially when I saw the lightning out of the window of the plane, I genuinely thought what if this lightning hits the plane? Am I going to die up here?

I know it might be a little extreme, I am a bit manic, however those were my feelings in the moment, and I was genuinely fearful. This moment became a pretty defining moment in my life, I had never been in a situation like this, and there are very few things that have scared me this much. But when I looked into myself, and started to apply the philosophy of the four noble truths, life is suffering, the cause of suffering, being my attachment to how I thought things should be, the fact that my suffering could diminish by taking a chill pill. Using my knowledge of lessening my attachment to how I think things are supposed to be, could help me in this specific moment, a moment surrounded by fear. That’s when things changed on the plane.

I won’t get too deep into the next list right now, but working with these truths and knowing that my obsession and attachment to what I thought, and what my expectations were only set me up for failure. When I choose to live in the moment, respect my surroundings, and do my best to accept what is really going on I was able to calm myself down, use my mantras, and truly believe that whatever was going to happen, was out of my hands. Things got much easier for me to understand. I was still fearful, but was much more levelheaded, and did not lose my shit on the plane. For this I am forever grateful for. My connection to my faith and the belief that, the more I am attached to a thought process the more suffering it can cause.

If all I want is to be happy, I have to step in to each moment fresh without attachment and allow life to be as it is. I don’t have control, and I have to remind myself that on a daily basis. I am Buddhist, so I don’t necessarily believe in someone in the sky, looking down on me making things happen. I do believe that there is a lot of energy from many past lives that are watching over me and there are many deities that I look to for solace and humility. I have to remember that I’m not the only person, there are many other people suffering just as much, if not more than I am, especially on the plane y’all… it was crazy, babies were crying, people were talking like it v was over, but at the end of the flight, when I stepped off of that plane onto ground, I walked into a whole new world of Drama.

As I was sitting in the waiting line to find another flight to somewhere, anywhere, but where I was at the moment. I was going to try to connect or just to try to get home, a wave came over off gratitude that I was just on the ground. I decided to get a ticket to come back home, to my little house in Kentucky and learned one of the biggest lessons of my life.

It takes extreme acceptance and humility to get through the really tough times in life. I believe this happened to make me stronger for what is coming in my future. I am grateful for the fear and what it taught me, I’m grateful for all the people that did help me survive and landed the plane safely. I’m just full of gratitude, because there are a lot of people that get up in airplanes and don’t survive. There are lots of accidents on the highway, and we lose people all the time to hit and runs and simple accidents. Just like that. They are gone….

Disease and malignancy is not the only terminal thing life is terminal. At any point we can take our last breath at any time we cannot get a chance to say goodbye or I love you.

If anything, it made me realize how precious life is for all of us. I’ve come to appreciate the lessons. I learn in life from the trials and tribulations, the calamity, the disappointment, the suffering. I am grateful for my suffering, for it makes me who I am today.

As always, I love you for reading

Be Well

Wonder If