You make it to the top of the mountain and you want to stay there. You hope the descent isn't to steep on the other side. Most of the time you reach the top only to realize there is another peak towering over you. I was able to reach one of my professional goals recently. Partly out luck, but mostly it was determination and hard work. But like any good challenge there are a lot of small challenges along the way. Or at least that's the way I approach it. Somewhere along the way someone asked how you eat an elephant? The answer is one bite at a time. Same lesson I learned from running, put one foot in front of the other and carry on. Keep your eye on the prize, and go for it.
One of the final challenges along the way was my fear of flying, and guess what I had to fly to the destination. I wasn't going to let that get in the way of reaching my goal. So I set off into the darkness, I knew nothing about flying or preparing for air travel, I had never even been to an airport. I pick a parking lot and luckily look up as I'm leaving the lot to see that it was O3 and wrote it down. After wandering the lot at another event, I decided to remember locations. Then I hopped a shuttle bus to the terminal. I get out there and realize I didn't plan the next step. I finally ask a couple of NSA uniformed people where I needed to go. They pointed me in the right direction. I then jump through the rest of the hoops and eventually board the plane. We taxi and pick up speed. I assume we are going to go into hyperdrive eventually like the Mellinium Falcon and I will be plastered to the back of my seat. I eventually look out the window and we are above the clouds. No Mach 3, no going straight up space shuttle style, no nothing. I like analogies and the best comparison I can come with is a bus ride. Big Whoop! I have a fear of heights so I requested an aisle seat, another mistake. The guy next to me is the Area Person over LP so he is not exactly a friendly face. In between us is an empty seat. To survive take off I plug in Jay Mohr and listen to one of his podcast, like I would on my normal commute. Another trick I learned along the way is to reduce the brain's workload and make things as normal as possible, cut back on the new stuff to process. The sun is on our side of the plane so most of the shades are down around me, so I really can't see out. I finally ask Mr. Suit when we start to descend if he'll take a picture for me, that way I can prove I did it and didn't just rent a car and drive to Florida. It turned out to be a pretty cool pic over the wing. It's not really my pic though cause I never really saw the view myself. It's like me stealing one of your memories and calling it one of my own. We land and make our way through the maze of the airport to collect our baggage and board a shuttle bus to the hotel.
I started this blog to discuss the different speeds in which our minds seem to measure time and distance. Air travel gave me a whole new conundrum, I had been to Florida twice before this trip. The first time I was a passenger in a car and the second time I drove the entire trip. Those are long days in the car. Air travel changed all that. Until we went to Universal for a few hrs, it never seemed like I was in Florida. So instead of finding a way of slowing down the world, I sped it up. 2014 has been that way more often than not. I changed stores and whatever comfort zones and safe routines I had went out the window. It's all been new and fast paced. It's like I reached the peak and continued over the mountain gaining momentum down the other side. I have to find a way to transition this energy into climbing the next peak without crashing off the cliff.
