(not) Pondering last moments

On Monday, the day I began this trip the big news was of an airplane that crashed into a mountain for what at first seemed no good reason. I usually check CNN or Reuter’s online evenings when I’m away from home and so I learned in due course that was misdeed as opposed to mishap.

Another instant mass murderer has taken his fifteen milliseconds of fame. Another hundred-plus people with no unifying theme more compelling than a common choice of conveyance shared their last moments together, probably in the mounting panic that accompanies a rapid descent from the heavens to oblivion.

So I have to wonder how many of the people with whom I share this plane, my flight home from Omaha paused to think as they boarded whether they would end up collecting baggage at SeaTac or being collected from a lonely ridgeline in the Rockies.

I didn’t. Worry about it, that is. Except that it clearly crossed my mind; hence this missive. I don’t wonder what it would be like to hang from my seatbelt in an inverted plane, trying not to understand just how final this trip had become. Because I can’t.

I can’t dwell on this sort of thing and still do what I do. And what I do is more important than what some crazed individual might do.

Or, so I tell myself…