At an altitude of 38,000 feet, I always felt like I was flying towards possibility. That a mechanical, steel tube even got off the ground — especially something like the Airbus 380 — left me in awe. Until the day I caught a whiff of an electrical burning smell and shot out of my jumpseat, as did the rest of my colleagues. Anticipating a rapid descent into chaos, for the first time in my four years of working as a flight attendant I had one thought: This is it.
It wasn’t. The flight diverted and landed safely. We spent a couple of hours on the ground while the mechanics figured out what was wrong and fixed it. Then we were on our way home. [Read more…] about Take Positions for Takeoff – Part I: From Chaos to Possibility
The dog, barking louder than the music streaming through my earphones, charged straight for me. Leapt off the ground with each pounce. Dove low, still barking, and it looked like I was about to lose a big chunk out of my leg. It wasn’t until I ended up thrusting myself against a storefront, hand on my chest and feeling my heart jackhammering inside, that the owner finally spun around and saw me.
Holed up in my London hotel room at the beginning of the month, I reviewed my goals for February — what I had completed and what I hadn’t. And I got mad. Mad! At myself. I was a hot mess because, when I was honest with myself, I wasn’t acting with intention. In fact, and despite what I wanted to believe, I’d been operating on autopilot mode. How many hours had I wasted watching reruns of Anger Management and The Shield? Too embarrassed to admit. How often had I thought about cleaning up my desk (it’s a perpetual disaster zone), but never took action? Hint: it still looks like it’s been hit by an atom bomb. How many times, twenty or thirty minutes into a writing session, had I been distracted by the clothes piled high in the laundry hamper or forgetting to turn on the dishwasher, and stopped writing to tackle them? Honestly, let’s not go there.