Flight of Kindness

Do you ever consider your INTERNAL thoughts?  The ones that seem to pop into your brain automatically, perhaps uninvited.  They are thoughts that can usually be dismissed, but I recently took time to examine some of mine, because they seemed very worthy of introspection.  They are thoughts I am not proud of, but I will share them here with you in the hopes that they may teach you the same lesson they taught me.

I took a flight on a small-ish airplane recently.  You know the kind – two seats on either side of the aisle.

(And see, saying “you know the kind” presumes from the get-go that you and I have a shared experience.  That we both have been inside just such an airplane, so that when I say, “two seats on either side of the aisle”, you immediately conjure up a mental image of the plane, perhaps even imagine yourself in that scenario.)

Anyway, I was recently on a small-ish airplane.  I got to my window seat and did my usual; window shade UP, armrest DOWN, seatbelt ON – good to go.  Then my seatmate arrived.  And this is when my internal thoughts started swirling…

My seatmate plopped down in the aisle seat and put all of her gear on the floor in front of her feet.  I wasn’t polite enough to even say hello, I kept my eyes glued to my phone screen (I warned you that I am not proud of this story…).  The flight attendant came by and said, “Ma’am, all of your items need to be under the seat in front of you…” in a rather cranky voice.  I wasn’t looking but could feel my seatmate look at the flight attendant, but not move to squish her (rather large) haul of items under the seat.  “Ma’am…” he said more exasperated, “Everything needs to go UNDER the seat.  This area (gesturing to the floor where her feet were covered with stuff) needs to be CLEAR in case of EMERGENCY…”.  Ahhh, that explanation seemed to work, she stuffed and squished her stuff up under the seat.

My internal thoughts were working overtime by this point.  “Why did she think she was so special that she could just leave her stuff on the floor?  Why does she have that big BLANKET with her?  Please lady, keep the blanket on YOUR SIDE.  And a pillow too?  And why, of all flights, is THIS the one that I forgot my mask in the carry-on they made me check planeside.  Ugh.” 

Pretty soon we started taxiing.  And shortly after that, I felt my seatmate’s arm go up, her phone point toward the window.

I tried to ignore what felt like a weird gesture…  Then I realized, wait, she is FILMING as we taxi…

“But lady!” my negative, mean internal thoughts swirled.  “We aren’t even in the AIR yet.  This is literally the tarmac – concrete…  Not gonna be the best video…  And you are in the AISLE seat.  Why didn’t you book a window seat if you want to make a documentary here???”

She kept her camera up, filming.  I kept my head down, looking at my phone.

After a while, she let out a little squeal, maybe more of a squeak.  It was SOME sound.  I must’ve let my negativity show on my face because she quietly said, “Sorry!  First time flier.  I gotta film this for my babies.  They’ve gotta see this!”.

Ahhhhh, ok.  Some of this was starting to make sense.  “Ah, that’s ok,” I told her, then added, “It’s gonna be a while before we actually take off”. 

She stopped filming for a bit and told me again that she was a first time flyer.  As we got to the end of the runway I let her know we would lift-off soon, and up came her camera again.

Her phone inched into “my space”, but it felt different now.  I understood the reason behind the excitement, the awkwardness.  This was new!  She was a grown woman experiencing flight for the first time. 

I tried to place myself in her shoes.  I thought back to my first flight – I was in high school and flew from Omaha, Nebraska to Washington DC.  I remember my parents had prepared me a bit for what to expect.  They told me that someone would come around and offer me a pop (soda) and I wouldn’t need to pay - that seemed to be the most memorable of the instructions. 

Oh, my seatmate was happy.  As we lifted off, she said on her video, “Look!!!!  We are leaving the earth!”.  Her voice was filled with joy and wonder.  As we got to the clouds, she was amazed.  “LOOK – THE CLOUDS!!!” she told her children on the video.  And she was not narrating the video just for THEM, she was gleefully expressing her thoughts aloud.  I watched out the window with her.  When I fly I often I close my eyes before take-off and am fast asleep by the time we are airborne.  Or I keep my nose buried in games on my phone.  But her wonder was contagious and I watched the magic unfold outside the window with her.  “Don’t the clouds look like COTTON CANDY???” I offered.

After a while she pulled the big pizza box out from where she had shoved it and had a few bites of pizza.  The flight attendant brought her a Coke.  She opened her phone and watched videos of her children, and when she noticed me peeking showed them to me.  She has a ten year old and a one year old, and it was obvious she was very proud of them.  They were adorable.

She told me that she had missed her flight in Charlotte, her layover city.  “I got off the first plane, see, and I went to go pick up my bag.  I thought that’s what you do.  Only, when I got my bag, by that time my plane for Florida was already leaving…  Now, why didn’t the man tell me that?  He looked at my ticket.  Why didn’t he tell me my plane was leaving??”.  That broke my heart.  I mean, in the grand scheme of things, missing a flight wasn’t that big of a deal.  But she didn’t have someone like I had for my first flight.  No one sat her down and explained the system – that she didn’t need to claim her bag until the END of her trip.  And that lack of explanation led to her having to go through security in two airports and missing a flight.

As we started to descend, I showed her the ocean and how it looked from the sky.  We saw a ship.  When we got over land, we saw a river and a road.  “Look, see the cars?” I pointed out.  “OH!” she laughed, “They look like toys!!”.

As we got close to the airport, I pointed out the big attraction that we could see from above – the Daytona Speedway.  “Oh!  I know that place!!!  I was there!  That’s where my truck died!  My kid had to sit in the parking lot there!!”.

And that is when more of her story came out.  Earlier she had driven her truck, filled with 8 people, from Virginia to Daytona Beach, Florida.  They must’ve come to Florida for vacation.  But the truck had died…  They ended up having to rent a car to get home, and stay in a VRBO home, too.  Those expenses had not been planned, nor had the cost of the truck getting towed.  So now she was flying back alone to try and get the truck to work and bring it home. 

She told me how much the truck was going to cost to get out, I think it was something like $1,200.  She explained that renting the car had been hard because car rental places won’t take a DEBIT card, you have to use a CREDIT CARD.  “So, I borrowed money from the debit card to pay for the credit card,” she explained.  Again, my facial expressions must have given away the fact that I did not know such a thing was possible.  “Oh, you can DO THAT!” she told me, “Only if you know how to do it!  And I do!” she told me proudly.

She explained that her insurance company might give her some of the money to pay for reclaiming the truck.  “Oh, they will mix it into my premium, but that’s ok with me,” she said.  Sure, anything to get her vehicle, her freedom, back.

Then she told me, “I have nothing.  I am landing here and don’t know where I am gonna stay or how I am gonna get there.  But I am not walking, that isn’t safe,”.  This woman had flown to Florida to reclaim her transportation (which I am sure she desperately needs) and didn’t even have a room for the night…  Oh...  

As we were getting off the plane I asked if she had checked a bag.  Even though we were in a small airport, I felt a sense of obligation to help her navigate her way into the warm Florida sunshine.  “They made me check the bag.  Didn’t make sense, it is the size of a purse!  Don’t know why they wouldn’t let me just hold it,” she said.  Ahhh, so her bag must’ve arrived on the flight she missed…  This would be trickier to figure out, so I decided to stay with her.

I realized that I had never bothered to ask her name.  It felt strange doing it then – like we had been friends for a while and I had to admit I didn’t know how to call her.  I asked, and she smiled and said, “Courtney with a Q!!”.  Ahhh, Qourtney.  Cool name!  I told her mine and introduced her to my partner when he found us in the airport.  He commented on her box of pizza and she said, “This is a $13 pan pizza, I am eating every bite of it!”.  Oh yeah, airport food…

We helped her find her bag.  I told her the area around the airport was safe.  And I gave her a Kindness Activist business card and $50.  I told her it wasn’t much but that it was raised to use to spread kindness and that I hoped it would help her out a bit.  She had not asked for any money, and I hope that she understood that the $50 was out of kindness, not out of pity.

She made me think, Qourtney.  She made me analyze those internal thoughts I had when she first sat down next to me.  It hadn’t occurred to me that this might be her first time flying.  I hadn’t thought about what the reason for her trip might be.

And it hadn’t occurred to me until I sat down later to think how similar she and I are. 

You see, on my first flight of the day (just hours earlier), flying out of my hometown, a town I fly in and out of a lot, I pulled out my phone.  And I held it up to the dirty airplane window.  And I snapped these photos.  Photos of how beautiful the earth looks like from the sky.  How magical things appear when you see them from a different angle. 

 

And in those few hours between when I could see the wonder of flight and when I met my seatmate, I had become colder.  Judgmental.  Less open.

Thank you for the reminders and the life lessons Qourtney.  I hope that you found a safe place to stay.  I hope that your truck can be repaired.  And I hope that you have a safe drive back to your babies. 

We are all so much more alike than we notice. 

Kindness Activist funds spent:  $50