90 Days of ILP

...but it doesn't have to be.

[Post for yesteday]

As a member of the "red eye" tax bracket, air travel to me is synonmous with sleep deprivation, a state of mind ill-fitted to handle the sorts of ILP practices one might find time alone on a plane conducive for: journaling, reading for intellectual stimulation and perspective-taking, meditating on the Emptiness of screaming infants and overweight men with bad hair. None of these were a possibility for me yesterday as I took a 7am flight from Denver to Dallas to Austin.

It was all I could do just to read a few pages of my in-flight magazine, go to the bathroom, and hover in that general distracted zone between wakefulness and sleep, where one second I'm being asked by a stewardess for my drink choice, then *blink* in the very next second the drink is on my table and the stewardess is 50 feet down the aisle and the teenagers making out next to me are laughing at the way my head lolls.

But there is one thing in which air travel excels: contemplation of death. Indeed, it is with full trust in other flawed humans that we cast ourselves into the stratosphere, hoping to return to earth in one piece a few hours later. Everything about air travel is designed to distract us from this fact (especially on jetBlue, who must spend more money on mini-TVs and free drinks per annum than incontinent men spend on toilet paper), and yet the fact remains: we humans strap ourselves onto a fuel-loaded missle, aim it at a distant collection of skyscrapers, say a prayer and hit "go", 1000s of times a day, as unceremoniously as most people tie their shoes.

Thank God, then, for the Winter Olympics, where a contemplation with death is built into the very name of some of its events, i.e. the Skeleton, the head-first solitary sled race where people with names like Jeff Pain put it all on the line for a disk of worthless metal. The irony, of course, is the flirtation with a far more gruesome collective death each racer must undertake en route to Torino: the plane crash.

And so how do we take this wisdom of death and build it into a "Traveller's ILP", where far more active forms -- such as the 3-Body workout, or Big Mind -- are far harder to do? One thing to do is to recognize the collective dimension of any excursion: feel into the lives of each person, the hopes and experiences aligned before and after this brief flight. Feel into the passion and heartache it takes to catalyze this trip in the first place: the job they have to do, the loved ones they have to see, the far-off vacation spot whose beauty beckons. Feel into, even, the sheer human ingenuity it took to make any of this possible in the first place, the unprecedented advances and shocking technologies which we limited, coffee-addicted beings were able to wrench from the hands of the Atomic Gods to put to our own uses.

Then feel into the fact that you are strapped, by mundane mechanics, to these lives and dreams and jobs and genius innovations, fully free for a few minutes of illusory spatial isolation, high above the clouds, closer to the sun, and deeper into the Great Big Blue.

[Marketing shill's note: Terry Patten leads an excellent meditation on death and dying on the Meditation With Form CD found in the ILP Kit.]