A moment to keep forever

I had always asked for an aisle seat or I would have to stand to let my seatmates crab-walk to go to the lavatory, or as in in one of my flights from Seoul to New York, I had to climb onto my seat and step over a snoring giant who I couldn’t wake up. 

But a squalling baby next to me, hence, loss of sleep, if I get a bulkhead seat, had always terrified me like a flight from Taiwan to Vancouver, once, especially with my sister then, to be concerned about—just hope no mom with an infant reserved the rest of the row, the ground stewardess on the counter warned as she pushed our new boarding passes to me.

Long erased from my wish list has been a window seat or any place preferred in recent flights. Never to happen again, unless I “buy” it, has been the luxury for reflection, which the vast universe from a window, gifts one who, like me, would rather bask in the infinite expanse, even if it’s terrifying in its beauty.

One such experience I must then forever keep is this: I woke to a brilliance that washed into my window as Southwest Airlines floated past Denver en route from Seattle to Baltimore. The light, I realized peering down, had burst not out of cloud openings, but from an illumined surface below.

A swatch of snow-brushed ground textured among crags where snow must have driven piles, smoothed ridges on low-lying slopes like tear-stained cheeks, as if a lover had touched after a rift, where snow must have blown— slanting, smoky and mysterious as veiled eyes, where the storm left a shroud of tulle on a lake—magnificence where words slide.

Words do not make such an immediate moment, indeed, wherein awe overwhelms. Nothing happens then, but a temporary freeze as the senses seem stunned. The eyes, windows that they actually are to the vastness out there and the vastness we carry within, merely encounter a kind of reflection that mirrors some truth, which reveals itself only as a shape, an image, however awesome it appears.

But would everyone be struck at all by such a reflection? Did everyone in that flight soak in the magnificence below? No. A woman in the window seat behind me slumbered like a lamb. A man in the aisle seat across from me fiddled with his smart phone. Behind him, an older man played cards with his sons.

Perhaps a few others had been aware of the wondrous beauty, but I wouldn’t have seen them from my seat. One thing I knew–attentiveness and focus on moments, which lead to reflection, must be earned; masters of the mind have taught us that the more still a pool, the clearer it is and the deeper it flows.

I realize then that reflection has nothing to do with the nature of reality but in the realm of essences, as in the meeting of the visual sense and that landscape for those who had set eyes on it. Wherein lies the difference?

Among those who barely glanced at the scene, reality could have been what seemed close at hand—the cards for the father and his sons, for instance, in which the essence of the moment meant joy in the game. To those who gazed at the scene, like me and Tina from Bellingham, reality stretched beyond what we saw, and thus, its essence lay in what would later surface from the stillness of the moment.

That I must have advanced somehow toward the stillness, I realized days after I landed in Baltimore and began to think about how I would write this piece. Reflecting on the theme, I felt as sleek as a diver, yet floating and fluttering winged in the deep, rising and breathing freely in the vastness, encountering a truth the snow scene revealed. And it was this: the essence of true beauty is peace, the absence of resistance and stress that a moment impinges as it passes into perfection. True peace thus, lies in an absolute faith in the moment—that with its passing, if not fought, comes transformation, even with violence as in the snow storm just over, which carved the mystifying scene.

Silence. Quietude. Stillness, where reality set against an opaque background bounces back, shorn of weight and texture, defines the moment of reflection, when reality washes into the eye and seeps into that deep vastness within us. Here, realities metamorphose into truths revealing themselves often not immediately but hours, days, even years later. Some truths rise unexpectedly as a passing thought, others wing in only in an unchained mind.

For many, this depth remains unreachable, and the truths, untapped. But for the few who have disciplined the senses, they merely slink into it. Some are known prodigies of reflection, most take years to attain it. For me, it has been a lifelong process and I often regress, though I have persisted in starting over and over again, even if a window seat has receded beyond my reach.