Flying High
There is something about being trapped in the middle seat in a flying coffin at 35,000 feet with 200 flu-ridden strangers that seems to inspire me. For some strange reason my brain tends to kick into overdrive (I’ve got a GREAT idea!) or shut down completely (in which case I just drool on the shoulder of the poor schmuck next to me). It’s feast or famine baby!
Maybe it’s the altitude that creates the right environment for bright ideas. Perhaps the lighter cabin pressure causes my brain cells to expand in subtle ways. Maybe, due to mild altitude related swelling at the cellular level, my brain just gets bigger! My thoughts expand correspondingly and the next great blog post is born! Or maybe it’s the fact that I can’t move for 2 – 5 hours or more. Being firmly belted into a seat for that long does strange things to a guy like me. I like to roam, and I tend to operate with a lot interruptions in my life. Strap me down to a chair for 5 hours and it does weird things to my mind. It starts to play tricks on me. I start to get ideas…lot’s of ideas. Maybe I just go a little stir crazy sitting in one place for so long.
Or maybe it’s the sense of powerlessness that accompanies the modern traveler these days. When you travel by plane you get groped, scanned, assigned, reviewed and humiliated in so many different ways that it tends to leave you, if not exhausted, then pissed off and ready to enact some serious change. And let’s face it, when you are thinking about change, you’re usually coming up with some good ideas.
Regardless, the ideas that I seem to come up with on the plane are freaking BRILLIANT! I take a note pad with me so that I can write them all down. OK, I’ll be honest, not all the ideas are brilliant. Probably a good 80 percent or more are completely lame. They’re so bad it hurts. But the remaining 20 percent are pure gold!
So with that in mind, I’m off to do a little brainstorming in the stratosphere. Next stop XP2011!