Forty thousand feet above the ground, no matter what seat you're in, is a first class spot to watch the sunrise. As we lifted off of the ground, the fog laid lightly over the rolling hills, turning the chaotic life below into an ocean that gradually flowed into the clouds as we rose above them. It lifted and sank as waves do, revealing tips of buildings and crests of rolling mountaintops. As the sun so lightly played with the mist, I watched the shadows dance inside the dream of the morning.
The clouds slid past one another in the morning chill, and the sun rose to kiss them with its orange glow. They parted ever so slightly to give a glimpse of the foreign world below, making it look smaller than I have ever felt.
I sat in an aisle seat, craning my neck to get a glimpse of the impending dawn as the sun crept over the wing of the airplane and made silhouettes of the people who sat across from me.
They slept. They slept as they were adorned in the gold of the sun on a perfect morning up with the birds. I watched a man in the window seat across the aisle from me, slumped against the worn leather of his seat with the shades pulled over the window while the sun breached the horizon.
We are a privileged people. We have the luxury of taking days off, of flying to white sand beaches and of being part of the clouds while flying over them while others in this world will never step foot in the sand or see the ocean waves roll over one another as the tide comes in. I watched as their eyes were fixed on the backs of their eyelids or on a book or game just trying to pass the time, but what time needs to be passed while teetering thousands of miles above our finite earth?
We need more sunrises in our lives. We need more of the exhaustion that puts us to bed at the end of the days when we are tired because we have used the entirety of the day for what it was worth, not just for how we took it. We need more days that end in the satisfaction of having watched the sun climb over the leaves or break through the clouds whether it be from the air or the grass. We search for meaning in our lives by searching for more to stuff our schedules with, but maybe what it is we should be doing is freeing them for time to appreciate what it is we so often take for granted.
