“The cave you fear to enter may hold the light you seek.”

—  Rumi

Over the past many years of my life, I have traveled a lot for work and invariably have experienced a flight that had some turbulence. It is all part of the flying experience! In the last three years, my travel has been significantly less, mostly personal and thankfully uneventful.

Until....

On a flight just a few days ago, we experienced the kind of turbulence reserved for thriller films. For the first, and hopefully only time in all my travels, it truly felt as if the plane was going down. Allow me to set the scene…. 

My partner, our trained service dog and I were traveling together. While we’d had an initial flight delay due to weather, once the flight took off, all was going quite well. Even though there was still some bad weather in our area, by all accounts it had largely cleared, and we thought we had left all of it behind.

About a half hour into the flight, the plane began violently shaking (which we all know is usually how turbulence starts and then settles). But then, the plane also began rocking deeply side to side, as if the wings were a seesaw. And almost simultaneously, dropped and dropped, and dropped again. Fast!

As if the floor had suddenly opened…we were losing altitude. 

People were screaming. The shrill was as piercing as the rattle of the plane. Some were praying aloud and others sounded as if they’d begun crying. It truly was like a terrifying scene out of a film. 

Looking back now, it makes me think about what I thought in those moments and what it has helped me “see”. 

My first instinct was to reach for my loved ones on the flight; my partner and our dog. I reached over for my partner’s arm and held it and together we reached for our dog, who was sitting tall on his hind legs and had placed his head on our knees. We took deep breaths and held one another as a family triangle – my right hand on my partner’s arm, our heads leaning towards each other, his and my left hand on our dog. 

The three of us, seemingly instinctually, leaned into each other and stayed in that “lean”. If that plane was going down, we were going, held together, as one.

Quite possibly because of my conditioning as a chemo patient, I immediately began to focus on my breath to help prevent nausea and getting physically ill. So I breathed, deeply. Nearby, amid the screams and prayers of other passengers, I heard my partner breathing and through my hand, I could feel the pulse of our dog’s heartbeat.

When I closed my eyes, a picture of my mother, father and sister flashed, followed by some of my other dearest loved ones, memories with laughter, clouds, the ocean and mountains. It was like a rapid slideshow clicking through my mind. Infinitesimal glimpses of a love-filled life.

And then, suddenly, as unexpectedly as the turbulence had begun, everything settled and the plane started gaining altitude. Suddenly, all was silent and then…

The voice of the lead flight attendant broke through the silence, as she calmly said over the intercom, “We’ve made it through. We’re out!”

And so we were….

What had seemed like an interminable episode of screams, chaos and then eerie silence, was instantly replaced by cheers, laughter and clapping. As if on cue, our dog shook his head (as dogs often do…in my view, to clear their thoughts), and we laughed at that, while still holding on to each other. It was as if he was saying, “shake it off people..you heard her, we’re out!”

In the days that followed, I kept thinking back to the turbulent moment on that flight and what it revealed for me.

As a cancer patient, in many ways, the last four+ years of my journey have felt like endless turbulence. The perpetual feeling that the bottom was falling out and being rocked from side to side, is unfortunately, all too familiar. And I say this humbly, for me, it has revealed that I am far more resilient than I would have previously thought, and I’ve developed “muscles” I did not know I had.

Navigating through the initial shock of the diagnosis, the absolute terror of chemotherapy, the very long shadow of ongoing treatment and the deep ripples of difficult side effects, creates what almost feels like a secondary set of muscles (both physical as well as mental).  In my view, the largest and most influential mental muscle we can all develop lies within the power of gratitude.

I realize now that it was indeed that “gratitude mental muscle” which I subconsciously leaned into during the flight turbulence a few days ago. In that moment, I felt that if that plane was going down, at least I was with loved ones and in my life, I was loved....for which I am grateful. It is what got me mentally “through and out”. And gratitude is also the soundtrack in getting through and out of the cancer journey.

And so I wonder whether you’ve experienced something similar (some “turbulence”), and what it revealed for you?

We’d love to hear from you, so drop us a note.

With love,
Amelia O.