Wednesday, September 4, 2013

I hate to fly...but sometimes you just got to give yourself over to the universe

The following is a thought I shared with somebody, so I thought I'd post it here as well:

I think, on some level, we all fear flying to some degree. It’s just unnatural. My problems with flying are somewhat tied to my analytical brain…oh, and entropy. The thing is, if you pause for one second to consider the thousands of mechanical and electrical processes that have to work perfectly, and in harmony , to keep an aircraft aloft, and then consider the inescapable 2nd law of thermodynamics, nobody would ever fly again. Things break. They fall apart (right Yeats?). Decay. Crack. Warp, bend, and shatter. Entropy dictates things naturally progress from orderly, structured, harmonious states to disordered and deconstructed states (this is, of course, until they reach a point of equilibrium, which is pretty harmonious if you think about it…but equilibrium means your plane crashed…probably thousands of years ago). Anyways, every time I fly, I just look at it as me giving up and turning myself over to the universe, and essentially gambling that the metal, composites and plastics holding me aloft are, at least on this day, relatively fresh on their entropic journey of falling apart. I’ve never felt the need to gamble (with money), I don’t see the appeal. I figure flying, and gambling with my life, is thrill enough for me.

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