The Window Seat

“Sir?”

–

I read once that astronauts experience this thing called ‘the overview effect’. They get up there, into space, and they look back down at the Earth. And all in one frame they see their home. All of it. Everything they’ve ever known, all in one spot. And behind it is this endless, limitless, boundless, timeless, infinite expanse of empty black. It’s the closest thing to seeing the face of God itself.

And in that black, distance suddenly means everything and absolutely nothing at all. Miles no longer matter. And everything that maybe seemed so foreign or strange as a different country or culture on Earth is suddenly realized to have been so embarrassingly close by this whole time. There’s no such thing as an Other, or a Them, or a fight that’s at all worth fighting over when you see it from up above.

It’s why I like having the window seat on airplanes. When it’s taking off or coming in, and you’re just a few thousand feet above a major city, and you get to see it all while still being close to it. See all the cars on the highways, see all the streets winding like veins through business centers and neighborhoods, seeing all those houses, each with a family or two inside…

I read about another term too, called “sonder”, out of the Dictionary of Dark and Nameless Things. It’s the term for that existential feeling you can get when you realize that everyone you meet, everyone you come into contact with, even if it’s just a glancing one on the sidewalk or in a restaurant, they each have a story and an inner life that’s at least as rich and complex and complicated as your own, with thoughts, observations, dreams, lessons, experiences, wants, pains, et cetera.

However complicated my life may feel sometimes, or how drowning or urgent it may seem to me some nights, seeing all of those streets, those houses, those lives, those souls and lived experiences remind me how many of us there are. They remind me how incalculably many of our stories there have been throughout history, each and every one as meaningful or tragic or triumphant as the next. It reminds me that I am a drop within an ocean, one star inside a galaxy, no less phenomenal for my smallness nor my brevity on this planet, which itself is one among untold billions. And in that brevity and in that smallness comes the privilege of ever being.

And that, in itself, is pretty great.

–

“Sir?”
“Oh! Uh, yes? Sorry. Yes, what? Sorry.”
“Would you like anything from the drink cart?”
“Ah, a Sprite. Thank you.”