I’ve been traveling. A little bit of very welcome vacation.

On the way back home, nearing the completion of our flight, I found myself in the middle seat of a row of three, my husband to my right on the aisle, and a 20-something-year-old woman next to the window to my left.

This fellow passenger had already taken her seat when my husband and had boarded the plane. We nodded hello as we stowed our belongings and got settled. Then she put up the hood of her hoodie, put on her earphones, pulled down the window shade and withdrew into her privacy – where she remained for the next 6 hours.

The crew announced the emergency instructions before takeoff. We barreled down the runway. The flight attendants served drinks, then the meal. Movies shieked and glowed from seat backs in all directions. My husband and I went to the bathroom, then a couple of hours later, made the trip out of our cramped row and down the aisle to the back of the plane again. Then drinks and a snack were served once more. And all this time, our seat mate remained utterly quiet (apparently sleeping), nestled tightly within her hoodie. Occasionally she stirred. But otherwise she was OUT.

She was still gone from the world when the captain announced the final approach to our destination.

Now typically at take off and landing, I press my nose against the window and watch everything I can going by out the window like a dog with a manically wagging tail. I am fascinated to see the perspective on earth from above.

But on this particular day, for I think the first time in my life (or for at least for as long as I could remember), I could do none of that. A little wistfully, I glanced over my husband’s torso to the right to see if I might get a glimpse out of the plane on the other side. But the window shades were drawn on that side of the plane, too. In fact, I noticed as I glanced about, the shades were drawn all around the plane. There was no way I would see outside. Not on this landing.

At one point, I started to reach over across my slumbering seat mate to grab the window shade and toss it open. “What will it matter?” I thought. “She’s sleeping! She won’t notice one way or another… and then I’ll be able to see…”

But I fought back that folly. It was not my place to open her shade. The shade lay in the domain of the passenger seat, not my seat.

I was just going to have to accept that, this time, I wasn’t going to see outside the plane.

“Okay,” I thought. I settled in to observe my inner experience, then, if not the outer one.

The plane was certainly in midst of the drama of landing. I could hear the landing gear grind into position. I saw the flight attendants scurry through their final checks and buckle into their seats. When normally I would be craning out the window to visually embrace the new terrain into which I was heading, this time I could only sit, looking straight ahead at the little glowing map in the seat before me. Everything outside the plane was beyond the reach of my experience.

It suddenly occurred to me: This is like Being. Being is utterly accepting. Being does not seek to influence or strain. Being sits, at peace, with events moving all around. But Being exists within all that movement in a state of neutrality. Everything is simply witnessed. Everything simply just Is.

To sit, accepting and passive, in that plane as it landed – with no straining or intention to influence (or even to assess the outside) – was to be peacefully contained in a trusted world.

To Be, spiritually, in this world, is to ride the plane of Earth with no straining or intention to influence as it glides along in its orbit. To remain peacefully contained in a trusted world.

Without my doing anything but sitting, I could trust that pilot to land me safely. Likewise, I trust a Divine order to guide me and to guide the world. Even and especially when I can’t look out the window.