Flight

I am about to get on an flight.

That’s nothing new. I’ve been doing this for years, and on one level it’s completely normal.

Yet on another level, part of my mind still reels at the absurdity of this possibility. I get into a giant metal can along with several hundred other people, and we launch into the sky, traveling hundreds of miles per hour at 30,000 feet off the ground, and then arrive a continent away.

I mean, come on, isn’t there a part of you that say “Wait, that can’t be right!” It’s one of those aspects of modern life that splits my mind into two parts. There’s the part that simply accepts this as “normal” reality, and the other part that tells me that nothing so completely crazy could possibly be normal.

Then again, I often have conversations with people who are half way around the world, and I also consider that normal.

Maybe there has never been a “normal” in the human condition. Perhaps the very first people who ever built a fire, or drew pictures of animals on cave walls, were already stretching and changing the definition of the word “normal” in a way that would have startled their ancestors.

Maybe that’s just what it means to be human.

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