There are some moments in your life, unpredictable, and unanticipated but with the power to make you question your reality and transform your future. I experienced such a moment on a 75-minute flight from Jaipur to Chandigarh.
It was my favourite day of the week – Sunday. I was returning home with my 12-year-old son after meeting my husband. The weekend had been the most satisfying, having visited the “Pink City”, home to history, heritage, and heroic folk fare. Our usual banter over video games, study time, and sudoku-solving suddenly came to a screeching halt. Airborne, on a routine flight, we had just encountered a sudden drop in altitude, making drinks spill, carts crash and hearts flutter. The erratic announcement by the pilot urging all passengers and crew to return to their seats and fasten their seat belts added to the panic rising in my son’s mind. Clutching me tightly with his eyes shut, he asked me, “Are we going to die Mom?”
In my late 30s and being blessed with a mundane, drama-free life, my thoughts had never wandered to the question being posed by my tween up till now. If we were to be obliterated at this instance in our existence, certain realisations dawned on me. What had been my contributions to my family, relatives, society, community, and country? Had I made a difference in the lives around me? Had I shown empathy to my neighbour whom I had seen crying alone on the park bench one day? Had I offered to help the milkman’s kid, barely a teenager, to gather funds to be able to go to school? Surprisingly though, not an iota of my time during that terrible five-minute life-threatening turbulence went towards the sparkling new phone and watch that I had bought recently after months of deliberation, or the anger that I had been harbouring over an unresolved grievance with a customer or my annoyance at my best friend who had not wished me on my birthday. The remaining two minutes of the harrowing journey went towards things left unspoken with loved ones, the places that I had always wished to visit but had never been able to chalk out the time for, the movie that I had planned to take my 80-year-old grandfather for and the stories and life lessons that I had yet to share with my son.
{{/usCountry}}In my late 30s and being blessed with a mundane, drama-free life, my thoughts had never wandered to the question being posed by my tween up till now. If we were to be obliterated at this instance in our existence, certain realisations dawned on me. What had been my contributions to my family, relatives, society, community, and country? Had I made a difference in the lives around me? Had I shown empathy to my neighbour whom I had seen crying alone on the park bench one day? Had I offered to help the milkman’s kid, barely a teenager, to gather funds to be able to go to school? Surprisingly though, not an iota of my time during that terrible five-minute life-threatening turbulence went towards the sparkling new phone and watch that I had bought recently after months of deliberation, or the anger that I had been harbouring over an unresolved grievance with a customer or my annoyance at my best friend who had not wished me on my birthday. The remaining two minutes of the harrowing journey went towards things left unspoken with loved ones, the places that I had always wished to visit but had never been able to chalk out the time for, the movie that I had planned to take my 80-year-old grandfather for and the stories and life lessons that I had yet to share with my son.
{{/usCountry}}Drowned in my contemplations, I did not even realise when the tense atmosphere in the plane gave way to squeals of laughter and sighs of relief from people around me. My son and I joined hands and thanked the higher power out there for blessing us once again with the gift of life.
Once safely on the ground, this voyage made me wonder, why had I never thought of my past, present, and future in the way that I did? Why did I not endeavour to live life every day in a manner that gave me maximum satisfaction? And why can’t other people practice this exercise? This ordeal reminded me of this quote by the American philosopher, Ralph Waldo Emerson, “It’s not the destination, it’s the journey.”
The writer is a Ludhiana-based freelance contributor and can be reached at ashmeg20@gmail.com