This is your perspective speaking
Good morning this is your perspective speaking. I write this on a plane flying from Melbourne to Perth. Of course, people take flights like this every month, every week, even every day. For me, though, as an infrequent flyer, the very concept of humans flying is absurd. It’s not a new thought, but for me it gets me every time. All that metal. All those people. All those individual lives undertaking the same four and a half hour journey for these four and half hours only.
About an hour ago, I looked out the window to see, way down below, geometrically organised crops and neat little clumps of houses. I had to squint to see what turned out to be a field of wind turbines. They looked like teeny tiny toy desk fans, like you’d win in a Kinder Surprise if they did a work from home series. Looking down at the tiny Kinder Surprise desk fans, it was difficult to believe, but I told myself nevertheless: we argue about those.
Public Service Announcement: you guys down there, with your thoughts interrupted, perhaps, by the glinting of an aircraft way up in the sky or a little kid pointing out ’pwane!’… you are small but you are also part of bigger things.
Changing perspective is wild. You’ve probably read the same article I’ve read about how when astronauts travel to space they often find themselves floored by the undeniable knowledge that the globe is a tiny ball in the universe and we humans visit it fleetingly. This doesn’t strike them as a sad feeling, exactly, they say, but a profound one, tinged with a vague sense of euphoria. Like every day on earth people, if they saw this, would bounce out of bed thinking, ‘Fwoarr! I get to do it again?! Ripper!’
We’ve moved past the land now and we’re flying across The Great Australian Bight. I know this only because I was taught it in a school, which is something humans invented to teach each other things. Can you believe it! Fwoarrr!
I’ve just checked an app I have, and I’m right about the Great Australian Bight, which rather bolsters my argument in favour of schooling, but it also told me a few other things, one of which is that this aircraft in which I sit with hundreds of strangers is 12 years old. For twelve years, however many times a day, it has partaken in the unlikely science of human flight. I might have flown in it before. You might have flown in it before.
If you look down at the sea from here it looks, and I’ve only just noticed this, like the sky. There are small dots all over it, like stars, from high up. White spots in the blue. Twinkling a bit, even. Moving, any way. One, a tiny arc like a fingernail, could be a boat. Imagine the people in that boat, looking up, watching a plane pass by full of people from different places having different thoughts just like theirs or not like theirs at all.
Some of the white dots on the sea are waves, hopefully of no threat to our friends on the boat, whom we will never meet (or will be? If we do we will never know). The waves are tracked by people in something humans invented called a bureau. Not the cupboard type of bureau. That’s a question of context too. Phwoar.
The white dots could be twist or a blow undertaken by someone who is mammal just like you, with lungs just like you, and ribs, whose ancestors, like yours, once walked the earth.
The clouds look like you could grab them with your hand and wear them as a hat. Solid, fluffy show-off clouds. If I decide to trick myself, I can almost believe I’m upside down, the clouds between me and a sky full of stars, mysterious and moveable and well out of reach.
There is something, of course, that is not truthful about this kind of perspective. The clouds, for instance, are freezing and wild and the waves would, eventually, swallow me whole, indiscernible by the people in the planes flying overhead. It’s the same for the globe the astronauts talk about, too, of course. Because humans are despicable and wars break out and people who want power are so often not the kind of people who should wield it, and some of the white dots on the sea are likely to be rubbish, let’s face it, and maybe someone on this plane is leaving a cheating partner or going to say goodby to someone they have loved all their life. But our everyday perspective is deceptive too. It’s the shift between the two which, no matter how it happens, is always strangely surprising.