United Airlines is my new favorite airline. It's bad enough that I have to be 22,000 feet in the air in a crammed little
plane. It's bad enough that Tokyo is a non-stop fourteen hour flight. It's bad enough that ginger ale and cashews only taste good the first ten times. Just that little bit of leg room makes it all the better. I guess you could call me claustrophobic. But I'm really not- only my mind is.
For most of my education, my mind was like a Southwest flight, it's nice that round trip from learning to new idea is only $150 but the discomfort makes up for the discount.
Thoughts sit crammed by arm bars that press against their fattening love handles. When the nourishment comes there are no meals, only snacks of information- bits and pieces of old cashews, only one cup of ginger ale and nothing more. With no in-flight movie of novelty, thoughts simply stand up even when the fasten seat belt sign is on. Soon a hundred thoughts are standing, and they haven't even reached cruising altitude.
My junior year I was selected to represent our school in the NCTE( National Council of Teachers of English)
writing competition. I admit I was a bit shocked, particularly at the commitment- three months studying under a mentor and a final piece. But under my mentor, doubt soon became amazement. She first began training me to forget the old restrictions- to stop writing in five paragraph format, to forget the hook introduction and wrap conclusion. She told me to write as naturally as possible, to let my thoughts flow and words drop. She told me to get bigger seats and some of those puffy head rests for my thoughts. At first I struggled and I churned out a "Holden Caulfield tone gone terribly Asian school boy voice". But slowly I began to see my voice pour out in bleeding shadows of ink, printed letters and scribbles. With it, I began liberating my thoughts.
The three months passed quickly and soon my fiftieth draft was sitting on my mentor's desk. By this time, I wrote not for competition but out of love. For the first time I could open up my mind, I could express my ideas were freely. They didn't sit there grumbling about the flight and even when the flight attendants were told to prepare for landing, they whined that the flight was too short. For my topic, I had chosen the idea of Finding spirituality, and as I wrote I began to distinguish nuances of my own spirituality. I began to read willingly, get excited about coming to school, and love to learn.
Writing and NCTE then became my United Airlines. It was extra leg space for my ideas, it was real meals of learning, an in- flight movie now and then of literature, it was those little gray head rests that make resting easy and flourishing more comfortable.
This September I was informed that I was one of the winners of the NCTE contest. By this time I had ceased to care about winning- the experience itself was enthralling. My piece helped me understand so much about my spirituality that I had spent the summer reading books on philosophy and theology. The experience had also exposed new pockets of thought and by September, I had written tomes of poetry and short stories to uncover them. My hope is that my experiences in the future will be like NCTE, letting my thoughts fly the friendly skies of intellectualism- recreating paradigm, transforming destination into a means rather than an end.