Made it

Hi from LA everyone :-)

Got here on time and unharmed.  I had the absolute worst seat on the plane!  Last row, middle seat.  Not good at 6'3!  But it wasn't all that bad and the flight didn't feel all that long at all.  I watched probably 4 movies.  Lets see, Stone, The Departed, and bang just like that old age (and lack of sleep) prevents me from remembering what else.  But I also finished off two power points and got about 3 hours sleep.  Woke myself up snoring twice!  I wonder what my neighbours thought.  There was, I must say quite a bit of turbulence coming over Hawaii, well thats what the hostie said, but it felt like most of the way to me!  Just before landing I reckon if we had of been in the air another 10mins I would definitely have thrown up!  Yes a lot of air sickness...ewww.  

It seems that since a terrible experience with turbulence flying from Philly to Fort Worth back in 2007, any time there is turbulence on a plane I begin to feel sick.  It was awful.  That day I actually thought I was going to die.  I am not over dramatising, it is simply the truth, the plane just fell out of the sky for a bit.  You could see the thunder clouds in front of the plane and we were flying towards them, then (cue falling out the sky whistling sound). I caught myself when we recovered and literally had white knuckles as I gripped my seat for pure death.  You know what I could hear after we rovered?  Nothing but the whir of the engines...nobody said anything.  Just silence.  Even the hosties looked traumatised.  So since then flying has not been easy but I do it anyway.  Without it I couldn't do the things I love in life, including seeing family and friends, my little niece and nephews and coming to the USA for the dream job of a life time :-)

Trauma certainly is an interesting thing.  It is true that the experience of trauma is cumulative, not one incident and then another.  Hence that each time I fly, I feel sick when there is turbulence, not a renewed experience and I always remember that incident.  I guess on the flight over I also couldn't see the ground from my seat which would have given me a fixed point to stare at and therefore relieve the symptoms a bit.  But a wise man told me that the only way to beat or get past traumatic experiences is to have something else to focus on.  Job giving you PTSD, find meaning in something else.  He feels it is those who sit and contemplate the traumatic experience constantly with nothing to look forward to that suffer.  So what do I do?  I figure that the pilots and hosties aren't panicking and that you hardly hear of planes actually crashing, therefore turbulence, although frightening, can't be that bad and the planes are built to handle it. Secondly, as I said before, if I want to avoid it all together, I can avoid flying but then I would miss out on so much in this life.

So the trick is to find meaning in this life time and go after it relentlessly.  I am :-)

D