Flying with the window shade up

Everyone has heard of the phrase “glass half full”. It has become a universal analogy. Today, I wish to create a new common-place analogy: flying with the window shade up.

I have always been content to keep my feet firmly planted on the ground. I don’t like heights and I didn’t fly on a commercial plane until I was 24 years old. Never had a need to. As an engineer, I can build and solve the equations associated with flight, but it still holds a profound magic… and terror.

Despite this, I tell people that I still prefer to sit behind the wing, in a window seat, with the window shade up. They laugh when I articulate that if the plane starts to fail, I want to be the first to know that we are all going to die. I’m not joking.

This week, I join you from The Last Frontier: Alaska. I am here for a week, for work. It is the furthest I have ever been from home. I have exactly 92 photographs safely ensconced on my phone, now, from the plane ride in.

I was giddy to see the first glimpse of snow on the northern peaks of the Rockies – in August! The bright blue of the glacial ice, perpetually frozen, had me literally smiling to myself.

My neighbor was a bit annoyed when I poked him to show him the chunks of ice floating in a lake at the bottom of an ice floe – I’d interrupted his movie with Deadpool and Wolverine. When I looked up, I was amazed to see only a few others with their window shades up.

Perhaps I was the only tourist on the flight who has never been here before, looking at the most profound beauty in a foreign land. This desert rat has never seen so much inland water in all my life. The clouds parted for about half the time, offering sweeping views of rugged awe, while keeping some secrets in the distance for later. Even if you’ve flown it a hundred times, you’d find something new in the landscape each time, if you’d only bother to look.

Such is life. Just recently I was struck by how much my children are changing every day. My son starts middle school on Wednesday and my daughter is using words that I didn’t learn until I was in college. My trip is only diminished by the fact that I can’t share it with them.

Today, in a shop in downtown Anchorage, the owner asked me if I wanted to hold a gold nugget the size of my hand, after I snapped a photo of it in the case. I told him no, thank you. He was perplexed and said that he’d only been turned down one other time, by a miner who showed the shop owner a photo of a pile of gold of his own.

He said I’d taken a photo, why wouldn’t I want to actually hold it?? I told him the photo wasn’t for myself. And neither are the 92 photos I took from the plane. And neither are the photos of the moose and the porcupine I saw yesterday. Or the seagulls and mudflat coastline I shot tonight. They are what I can share with my children, while missing them from afar.

My mind wanders to the other 2/3 of people on the plane, not sitting by a window. Were they longing to see the sights, while the one in charge of the shade leaned against it to sleep? When I got on the plane, my neighbor asked if I wanted to trade seats so he could sit by the window. I politely declined. Turns out, Deadpool and Wolverine didn’t need the window seat.

I thought about bringing the kids up here for vacation, while remarking at the bright blue of glacial ice below. I already have a plan for alternating them in and out of the window seat.

So perhaps my analogy is to advocate to be an active participant in your own life, lest the world pass you by. Seek more, even if the journey is familiar. Don’t take things for granted. But, maybe most important of all, give your kids the window seat. Turns out, you probably won’t need to take as many photos of the ground that way.

Shawna Pfeiffer is a life-long Dona Ana County Resident, graduate of NMSU, small business owner, hobby farmer, dog-lover, outdoor enthusiast and mother to two young children. She can be reached at srpfeiffer1@gmail.com.