The older I get, the more skittish I am. It seems I’m figuring out that I have more to lose these days than I did during the wanderings of previous years. So what I’m saying is, it’s not likely you’ll find me hanging from another bungee cord anytime soon. Even the rise and fall of a plane ride, which I used to love, has become more a source of anxiety than thrill: the jet hits an air pocket and I’m seeing my life flash before my eyes, oxygen masks falling from the ceiling all Lost-style, hands sweatily gripping the armrest. The Husband and I flew to Chicago last weekend for a wedding (“Let this be your last flight of the pregnancy,” the doctor advised when I told him), and the cons of the flight were the tiny old plane and the fact that it was operated by American Airlines; the single pro was that we had our own two-seater row. (I don’t like strangers in general; the ones with whom I’m trapped in a small traveling space seem especially unbearable.) Our modicum of privacy was the diamond in the rough of our journey, and it allowed me to sit by the window without enduring the trauma of climbing over people I don’t know to race to the bathroom.

Sunday morning was gray and rainy, but we lifted off the runway and into the dripping sky without trouble. Then came the moment when we barreled through the blanket of clouds blocking the sun. The plane shook a bit, and our view of the Chicago skyline was blocked. Our view was blocked, period, replaced by impenetrable vapor. Then we began to emerge on the other side of it, and I remembered what would come next, the seeming miracle that transfixed me when I was a child: the fact that there was light above the clouds, that it never went away no matter how things appeared at ground level. I turned to TH and whispered: “It’s about to get sunny again!” Around that time, the light poured through, and a blanket of white soon unfurled beneath us.

I thought about vantage points, and the default assumption that mine is best; about the negativity I encounter from others and myself that, left untended, creates a thick haze over my head; about what life would look like if I didn’t go by just what I can see from ground level. I felt the gratitude known only by those who have been knocked around and picked back up enough to finally find rest in a wisdom that flies higher than theirs. After awhile, the clouds disappeared altogether.