Imagine yourself as a plane taking flight.
You are walking, slowly, down the road. Your cells vibrate with anticipation. There is a nervous energy in your stomach; you know what is coming next. Then you stop, only for a moment. Waiting for permission to take off. Your breath quickens, engines firing up. And then you run. Your pace increases logarithmically. Arms stretched wide, you feel the sensation of air in motion tickling your triceps. And then, like magic, you surrender to the wind and your feet are no longer on the ground. You are weightless. Your form held in suspension by the atmosphere. You glide. You were made for this. You take a deep breath. You are free.
I flew over Africa in the middle of the night. My first destination on my retreat from life.
Curious, I peered out my window into the darkness. Below were tiny clusters of lights, followed by vast spaces of emptiness. It was a long flight, Amsterdam to Johannesburg. I could feel the buzzing in my legs from the motion of the plane. It intensified the unrest I felt in my body, a mix of fear and excitement for what was to come.
And then, out the window, a flash.
I looked. The sky to the east of us lit up with fine lines of lightning. Sharp, bright cracks in the heavens. Each pulse of energy illuminated the clouds above and below. We were parallel to the origin of the lightning, watching it shoot down toward the earth. The formidable beauty of it captivated me. I wanted to be there, in the storm. The dangerous excitement of the picture before my eyes felt like a manifestation of my mind, as I soared to an unknown universe.
On the dinky monitor embedded in the seat in front of me, I could see that the plane was flying next to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a place I would not visit, but I would get close. After South Africa, my first stop was Uganda – and then I would backpack my way down the continent to Cape Town. That was all that I had figured out.
“Here I am where I ought to be.” -Karen Blixen, Out of Africa
What lies ahead, I do not know. Then again, you never really do.
