Airports, aircraft and life

 

Two years to the day, I set foot on American earth at Bloomington airport. Since then the airport has moved to a different location, become bigger and better, functionally and aesthetically, incorporated some new technology, upgraded old ones and thrown out the obsolete.

Our lives are so much like airports and its airplanes. Events land and take off like aircraft from our lives all the time. They bring with them people, people from near and far away, of different colors and races, some just stopping by, some coming to stay, some to say hello and go away, some to love and be loved and become friends for life.  

We try to draw up a schedule for the events of our lives, hand over traffic control to our intelligence and expect our planes to land in designated runways every time. But life, like the airport, depends on the weather in our hearts, whether we have clouded our skies with the smog of distrust and cynicism, whether our runways are full of uncleared ice, and how open we have kept the runways and how much sunshine we have let into the hangars of our lives.

But sometimes we also depend on the weather and the events at other airports. Sometimes we find aircrafts diverted to us, sometimes we can't help the fog and divert our own to others. Like traffic controllers, we need to keep the world on our radar screens, alert not only to the events in our lives but in others' too. We need to stand ready to receive aircrafts in distress, send our own out to help, or offers our hangars and hearts as shelters to the needy and not be afraid to ask for help ourselves. We need to light up our runways so that we can show others the way and never lose sight of it ourselves.

Events will come, some expected, some unforeseen, some small and some big and noisy and taking up so much of the space in our hearts. We need to see that the small don't make us complacent or condescending and the big don't make us arrogant or afraid.

Airports and aircrafts can be the biggest and the most beautiful but only as long as they do what they should. Like them, we need to bring people together and carry them with us and take them high into the sky so that they can share with us the wonder that is the world and rejoice in its blessings.

I would like to think that I too have grown in the last two years, moved to a new station in life, become more accommodating, and like the airport, embraced new ideas, become less dogmatic and discarded old prejudices and become a better friend and a humbler human being.