Gaining some perspective...

Wow, no post since Tuesday. This week sure flew by. Vacations and holidays are nice, but it's always good to get back on schedule. So, I'm reading this new book right now; I am hoping to finish it this weekend. It is called Miracle on the Hudson and is about the 150 people who survived Flight 1549 last January when their plane landed on a river. Though it's not the best written book I've ever read, the stories are riveting. I chose to read it after seeing some of the survivors talk about it on Oprah the other day and I thought it would be an interesting addition to my studies about death. I was excited to read it because I felt it would offer up a glimpse at what happens right before you die. Even though no one did, most thought they would. The surprising thing to me was that some didn't.

One passenger said that the greatest thing he learned from the experience was that although there is only one reality, there were 150 different perspectives of it. Those in the front of the plane near the engines heard the collision as a giant boom, to those in the back it was only a pop. Depending on whether they were in aisle seats or window, some knew they had hit birds, others thought they'd been hit with a bomb or had collided with another plane. One man who saw the large V of geese coming thought it was a group of fighter jets. Some passengers thought they were heading back to the airport, others thought they were headed for the streets and buildings of Manhattan, and a few knew they were going into the water. Some people were sure they were going to die, others were sure they weren't.

I think this is an incredible metaphor for our individual perspectives of life, which vary as much as our fingerprints. Just because one person happened to be sitting in the back of the plane, does that mean the sound really wasn't a pop? Just because another is sitting up front, does that mean the sound really wasn't a boom? Just because one person sees life from one corner of the world and not yours, does that make their view any less real? I guess it's like Lars- back to the idea of delusions. If he sees his relationship with the doll as love, is he wrong? If I see this incident as a miracle, am I wrong? If I see it as just a lucky coincidence that numerous things came together to make for a successful water landing, am I wrong?

Like the passengers on Flight 1549 who did not discover the true reasons behind the crash until after the ordeal had ended, we won't discover the truth about life until our stay here has ended (at least that is our hope). If there even is an ultimate truth.


Talk about perspective when you're perched atop the observatory at Monte Alban. Definitely my favorite part of the trip. It's on a mountain over 6,000 feet up and you have to climb almost 50 steps to get to the top. It feels as though you could reach up and touch a cloud. I've never felt so close to God.