This submission was accepted for publication prior to the tragic events of September 11. Because its content concerns the dangers of air travel, we originally considered not printing it at this time. However, we decided to that in light of these events, Todd's message may carry even greater significance.

You can go to flight school to learn how to be an airplane passenger. Not a pilot, a passenger. That's right, just call up a major airline, explain that you freak out above 5,000 feet and, depending on where you live, you will be referred to The Center for Travel Anxiety, ThAIRapy, Cleared for Take-off, the Fear of Flying Clinic, or The Institute for Psychology of Air Travel. Don't have sixty dollars per half hour to pay S.O.A.R. Incorporated's Captain Tom Bunn? Then try out "Achieving Comfortable Flight," a self-help course developed by Chapel Hill's own Dr. Reid Wilson, who made his name in aerophobia therapy by creating American Airlines' first national fear-of-flying program.

I hope these programs don't work too well.

Let me explain. Last December I was halfway into a US Air flight from Raleigh to Boston, when a stewardess stopped abruptly at the row in front of me. "Listen up. This is important," she said with a newly sober face to the sixteen of us sitting in the first-class section of this 737. I listened up. At 29,000 feet, I do everything uniformed people tell me to do.

The crackle of the overhead intercom interrupted the one remaining conversation in our elitist enclave. "I've got some bad news, folks," the captain began. Oh no. I am always uneasy about strapping myself into a multi-ton metal tube that rockets itself thousands of feet into the air, and this beginning sentence was making things worse. Remember, airplane pilots are the men and women who don't consider it "bad news" that you will have to sit in a crowded cabin for two hours, miss your connecting flight, stay over in a strange city, and break evening plans with loved ones. No, those announcements usually begin, "Folks, I have an update on our flight status...." "Bad news" from the airline industry is likely to be truly bad.

"We have an abnormal indication on engine number one," the captain continued. And without pausing for the end of that sentence, he added, "The engine is behaving fine, but our mechanics are advising us to return to Raleigh. I'm sorry for the delay..." Blah, blah, blah.

My usual image of a confident and in-control flight crew melted, as I imagined a scared young pilot in the cockpit staring at a flashing red light "Engine Failure, Engine Failure," and wondering why we weren't dropping from the sky already, as the ground crew could figure out no reason why the plane should still be working. My nervous imagination fueled my nervous energy, and I wanted to take control of the situation. But this was no time to live out my misconceptions of manhood at the expense of the other passengers by bursting into the cockpit and grabbing the radio to work things out with maintenance. This was real life. So I breathed deeply and recited The Lord's Prayer under my breath.

The middle-aged, Jewish mother to my right had a different way to cope with the situation and flagged down the stewardess. "I want four things." She began with the foreboding only a Jewish mother who is also a professor of international war crime law can bring to bear on a sentence that begins, "I want..."

"I want a Bloody Mary. I want a bag of peanuts. I want to know why we aren't landing at the nearest airport. And I want to know exactly what is wrong with this airplane." She stated firmly.

Amazed at my neighbor's clarity of thinking, while I had resigned myself to breathing and chanting, I could only stumble out a few words when the stewardess returned, "Yeah!... I want a Bloody Mary too.... And no peanuts."

Since I am telling you this story you can probably guess that the plane landed safely, despite my brief panic when the cabin lights flashed on and the stewardess shot up just before we landed. No big deal, right? Airplanes have minor malfunctions everyday, and millions of people besides me get worried by them.

Sure, but what stuck with me about the whole thing was the reaction of some of my fellow passengers. No sooner had we (thankfully) landed, than a businessman two rows ahead stood up and began pulling his bag from the overhead compartment before we had stopped at the gate. When the stewardess, who was understandably on edge, sharply told him to remain seated with his seatbelt fastened, he loudly grumbled to his neighbor, "I don't know what the problem is, we're on the ground." Ten minutes later, after we departed the plane, the people behind me in the ticket counter line were complaining, "By the time the next plane takes off, we'll have lost an hour and a half!" My former neighbor, who had come up with the Bloody Mary idea, was now holding up an enormous line at the ticket counter by arguing with the agent. She suspected that the young lady behind the ticket counter was trying to pass off counterfeit coupons, which were not in fact redeemable for a free round-trip ticket anywhere in the U.S.

Apparently fear-of-flying school had worked a little too well for these people. I don't know which ones were graduates of The Institute for Psychology of Air Travel, but my point still holds: Not all our fears are meant to be managed, blocked-out, or medicated, so that our usual worries can flourish. Raw fear brings a starkness to life that shows you clearly what your unfinished business is and what is just busy-ness. A little residual fear of falling from 29,000 feet might have taken some hostility out of these post-landing exchanges and left behind some patience and compassion. I wished the sobering effect of the abnormal indication lasted a little longer for myself too. I had felt so warmly towards my airplane-seat neighbor forty minutes ago, when we were slurping Bloody Mary's and talking about our loved ones; and now I was annoyed that she was wasting my time by hassling the ticket agent about the fine print on her voucher. I guess we humans are not meant to gaze upon our mortality for more than a moment. We can't bear the vulnerability.

So I wish Dr. Wilson and the rest of the aerophobia therapists the best of luck. I just hope there is a chapter in the fear-of-flying textbook that says, "You should be somewhat afraid of flying (and driving and walking and sitting). We can't make ourselves invincible, so stay strapped into the airplane seat for an extra five minutes and still be kind to the stressed-out stewardess; lose an hour and a half of travel time and still trust the overwhelmed ticket agent; let the lady at the front of the ticket line haggle with the agent and still wish her well; take all of life's abnormal indications as reminders that life is fragile and you can't blame other people for that."

James Todd is an editorial commentator for National Public Radio, living in Chapel Hill.

Time and Transformation (top)
Marci McPhee

Deadlines, time crunch. . . who has time to explore the self and search for meaning in a 24/7 world? We can all wish for the quiet of a Buddhist monastery or a desert island for communing with the infinite. But the realities of job pressure, school stress, and/or family demands mean an accelerated lifestyle in which we all speed past the spiritual. In an age of "dashboard dining," we hardly take time to sit and eat, much less ponder and meditate.

Hour of Presence During workshops on "Transforming Time" that Joel Bennett and I offered at Brandeis University in the Fall of 2000, I read the following from The Boston Globe: "In Norway, the government endorsed a campaign to remind citizens about the value of time. For one hour in a specified working day, Norwegians were asked to turn off their cell phones, snap shut their laptops, and symbolically at least, stop and smell the roses. Or even nap. 'This is about thinking through what we use our time for,' said environmental minister Siri Bjerke." "It happened in a whole country; why not at a small university?" I asked half-jokingly, rather as a rhetorical question. To my surprise, the workshop participants were enormously enthusiastic. I found myself at the forefront of a groundswell movement to take concrete campus-wide action. On Wednesday, April 24, 2002, from 2-3 PM, Brandeis University will observe an Hour of Presence in order to consider a more mindful, balanced, and healthful approach to time. Our proposal is that classes be canceled and administrative offices be closed, and all students, faculty, and non-essential staff would have this hour off. During this time, we encourage members of the University community to take a break—enjoy the spring weather, meditate, walk, sit, reflect, discuss, or rest—and take this time to think through what we use our time for. This action has the support of the University president, the chair of The Board of Trustees, the Undergraduate Student Senate, and several key opinion leaders among the faculty. Several Boston area colleges have expressed an interest in joining Brandeis to observe this Hour of Presence together. Whether you work or study in a college/educational setting or a public/private business, we invite you to join Brandeis in observing this Hour of Presence. If you would like more information about either the "Hour" or the "Time and Transformation" seminars offered by Dr. Bennett and myself, please contact me at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. Phone 781/736-2115 or email McPhee@Brandeis.edu.

My personal journey toward mindfulness began as most of my self-improvement efforts do: by adding it to my "to-do" list. In between "budget report due" and "take cat to the vet," I added "meditate." Little wonder I either snuck glances at my watch to see if my meditation time was up, or dozed off from exhaustion as I began to relax. Then my world turned upside down. My free-thinking daughter, age 20, turned up pregnant. The father of my first grandchild? "Mom, he's so wonderful. For his birthday three years ago he gave himself the gift of timelessness. He threw away all his watches and clocks, and for three years he hasn't known what time it is." "How does he get up in the morning?" "He just wakes up." "But how does he know when it's time to go to work?" "When the shadow from the sun hits the big tree below the second branch..." As I tried to let all this sink in, I found my assumptions about the way the world works challenged in a basic way. I always prided myself on my efficiency, productiveness, punctuality, reliability. But I knew that my own efficiency sometimes kept me tethered to the mundane, with little time for the spiritual. What if my soon-to-be-son-in-law was right? What if the problem with our hectic, mindless society can be solved by a single gesture of pitching the wristwatch? What if crossing the barrier to seeking spirituality was as simple as timelessness? In the midst of this confusion, I met Dr. Joel Bennett at the conference "Seeking Spirituality in the Workplace and Higher Education" at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. The title of his session, "Time and the Transformation of Work," told me that this was someone who knew something about these issues of time and spirituality. I approached him as I would a guru who could help me make some sense of this mental and spiritual chaos. He met me as he would an ambassador who has just returned from having discovered a primitive aboriginal culture.

As Joel and I have worked together, my entire way of thinking about time has shifted. It's no secret that our ever-accelerating society is leaving many people feeling empty and exhausted. One of the costs of a 24/7 lifestyle is having little time for introspection or for connection with the Infinite—the very things that are most nourishing, most deeply satisfying, and at the core of our very existence on this earth.

My challenge is to do my job in the world—to make enough money to survive—without sacrificing the things that matter most to me: my inner values.

With my workaholic friends at one pole of the continuum and my timeless daughter and son-in-law at the other pole, my personal quest is to strike a balance between these two forces. As part of this process, I've taken a look at my own fundamental assumptions about time and realized that "Faster is not better. Better is better." There are times I need to pull my car off the road and watch a breathtaking sunset and ponder my place in the universe. Such moments of connection with God are essential to my spiritual health. And there are other times when the work needs to get done, and I have to do it. Now. It feels like a contradiction, but it's just life energy circulating between two very valid parts of myself.

So much of my approach to life has been making things happen, structuring my time, and setting goals and priorities. But it's also true that spontaneous, unplanned "coincidences" that I didn't plan or arrange for can be major forces in my growth. There are many other ways of relating to time than my own linear way of thinking. Being more open to the synchronicity, flow, and chaos of life has freed me to notice areas of growth that I might have missed. I realize that I can do timeless things in a timeless way, such as meditation, taking time to honor and have reverence for eternal rhythms of life. Just connecting with deeper rhythms centers me, and then I can return to the world with renewed energy and life force.

My journey continues, exploring ways of relating to time that create space in my life for the infinite and my deeper self, learning to take time for the things that really matter to me.

Meanwhile, I hope my timeless grandchild and her timeless parents figure out how to catch a plane "on time" to visit me one day soon!

Marci McPhee is the Assistant Director for the International Center for Ethics, Justice, and Public Life at Brandeis University.

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