Impossible

I recently had the privilege of traveling to Scotland, where I spent a week visiting an old friend. He attends school in St. Andrews, a quaint, windswept village along the north sea. Textured by cobblestone streets, aging stone facades, and castle ruins which predate the discovery of America, the diminutive coastal town is equal parts charming and alluring.

Oh, and it’s also the birthplace of golf, home to the oldest course on the planet – the aptly-named “Old Course,” – the world golf museum, and the R&A, which is golf’s global governing body and official rules-maker. Needless to say, as a lover of all things golf, it was a bucket list trip for me.

But, strangely, the trip’s most formative moment didn’t actually happen in St. Andrews. It didn’t happen staring stoically out over the sea, feeling the briny breeze press past me and continue its slow erosion of the stone hamlet. It didn’t happen in the pastoral hills outside town, or even on the centuries-old fairways of the Old Course, the very same fairways once trod upon by the likes of Tiger Woods and Mary Queen of Scots.

No. It happened in the stale air of a cramped airplane somewhere high above the Atlantic.

It had been a long night. Or rather, a short one, depending on which way you look at it.

We left Kentucky at 4:30 EST, flew for 7 hours, and landed in Edinburgh, Scotland at 7:30 AM local time (GMT). Out of those 7 hours, I slept 0. So not only did I lose 5 hours with the time change, but I also pulled an all-nighter. Not an excellent start to the trip.

But looking back, I’m actually thankful for the lack of sleep. Because approximately an hour before we chased down the sunrise somewhere south of Iceland, I decided to pull up the shade and look out the window.

I was greeted by complete blackness. There were occasional wisps of clouds passing in the foreground, but the space beyond them was dark and abyssal. I continued looking out for a long time, into the bottomless void beneath me, until finally it dawned on me:

Flying over that immense black expanse of ocean can teach us a few things.

First, the world is impossibly big.

Looking out that window made me feel like an existential speck, a meaningless blip on the surface of an unmarked planet. It wasn’t the darkness that swallowed me – it was the sheer size of it; engulfed and inconsequential, I couldn’t look away. Oddly, I found some measure of solitude in that smallness. After all, there is something to be said about being a small cog in a much grander machine.

Second, the world is impossibly small.

Paradoxically, even as I stared into the all-consuming expanse, I felt the claustrophobia of the plane around me. It reminded me that no matter how big the void or how grand the machine, this little plane could bridge the chasm. This existential speck, this inconsequential blip – it could conquer the expanse; it could cross the sea without so much as a groan. And in fact, upon achieving the feat, it would turn right around and do it all over again. Our world is not nearly big enough to mandate isolation. For better or for worse, we are all connected.

Lastly, nothing is impossible.

By the time the sun crested the horizon south of Iceland, I had begun to see the black expanse not as a void, but as a blank slate. Sure, the world is impossibly big and impossibly small. And yes, we’re cogs and blips and specks. But we are not inconsequential. And most importantly, our story isn’t over.

Much like that Boeing 757 I was crammed into, we can bridge the chasm. Tragedy may have befallen us, rewriting our narrative in unexpected and undesirable ways, but nothing is impossible for us, no matter how big or small. Our hope is all the fuel we need.

And by harnessing that hope, we too can conquer the expanse.

A fellow journeyer,

Bryan