November 16, 2025
The captain just announced our cruising altitude of 34,000 feet. It’s 1:31 in the afternoon somewhere here over the American Midwest. It’s surprisingly quiet for a full flight. The window by my seat is a blend of my reflection and the ground below—a doubled vision, as if I’m watching myself watch the world diminish as the world watches me fade away.
My memories are like the hectares and hectares of farm fields below—sprawling. Endless. They all exist in parallel. I’m sempiternally unable to touch them all at once. They span my life like the green earth spans the horizon below. They touch the lives that touched mine, and the lives I’ve touched in turn. How can there be too many and yet not enough? How can all of these be me below while I’m here now up above?
I prefer window seats because I can peer out and forget that I’m trapped precariously in a long thin pressurized metal tube defying gravity and distance. I can forget the 200-something people traveling ahead, beside, and behind me. I can forget the miraculous method of this means of transportation. I can take it for granted because to explore it means to penetrate its magical illusion and risk breaking the spell that keeps us safely aloft and in motion, traversing what was to what will be. For the alternative is that we stop and fall into the oblivion of a great unknowable unknown.
Flying creates its own liminal space. Dozens of strangers pressed against seats against bulkheads inside this narrow over-sized siphon where compressed metal fashioned by other strangers holds our very lives. A unique space, this vehicle of technological wonder and convenience, creating a temporary liminality within a liminality. The one of being within this vessel and the one that is my own existence. That third space of dispossession called me.
Around me, 200-some-odd strangers continue this strange momentary airborne communion of ours. The businessman in 12C works on his laptop with the grim determination of someone whose value is measured only as commodity. The mother in 14B soothes a crying toddler with the practiced exhaustion of someone who has learned that comfort is temporary. An elderly couple holds hands over the armrest between them, joined through time and space. We are all here, together, and yet we will never see each other again. This fact creates a strange freedom—a permission to simply exist without the burden of being known. An obscurity only the mass of humanity can provide.
This is a space where normal structures dissolve and everyone here becomes ambiguous, undefiend. Betwixt and between, as Robert Louis Stevenson once wrote. Such a state as this is a dangerous one, not because of its physics, but because transitional states challenge all customary categories. We have surrendered our valuables, our social status markers, and even our lives to the 180-decibel roar of engines and the intermittent popping of pressurized air.
We are all trapped here equally, regardless of seated comforts, equally subject to forces beyond our control. We are all now in a silent peculair camaraderie, not the deceptive “we are all in this together” of popular culture, but a strange kind where the recognition of rank, wealth, and the markers of power have momentarily ceased to signify.
We are peers in suspension, theirs is temporary. Mine is permanent. I am not trapped in here with them. No, I am a child of liminality—they are trapped in here with me.
Far below, the sprawl of this great continent stretches into what seems an infinite grid. I have lived in several points of this grid, off and on, through the years. I have worked in the bastions of public and private organizations from Seattle to Miami, with people of all ranks, backgrounds, and walks of life. I have written of life in the City of Gardens and the Garden of the Gods, from the Washington Monument to Monument Valley, struggling to articulate—by way of my somewhat off-kilter understanding—what living in a third space feels like, especially when no one else seems to care. When no one else can relate. And I am here, as Gilbert O’Sullivan sang, alone again, naturally.
Despite this, I lend my talents to educational projects, activities, and conferences where people tell stories of shared culture and belonging, the kind that requires a single-ish identity, an imagined coherent passport, a home where your skin matches your soul, your uniform matches your spirit—and I have always felt that particularly peculiar isolation that comes from not being able to join in, never truly belonging, unable to fully integrate into anything except my own liminality.
I have always felt, if I may beg your patience, that hybrid cultural identities are not a failure of integration, but a form of resistance, a space where new meanings can be created precisely because one is not trapped in essentialist categories, free of the limitations with which orthodoxy binds us. The productive ambivalence that lives in the third psace is where something else emerges—something that contains the qualities of two territories and defies the terms and conditions of both.
As my plane banks slightly to the left, I can see the horizon curve, proof of this sphere we call Earth, a bounded home, a fragile system of nature versus nurture, of ecosystem versus human ambition—all self-contained. All frighteningly vulnerable. I imagine this is the “overview effect” that astronauts experience gazing at Earth from space. A cognitive shift that induces a transformation of consciousness. But I do not claim such wisdom or insight.
I see multiple worlds across the endless fields below. Each one mine, and each one yours. Together they form our reality. But we are as much separated as we are together. My reality sits besides yours, and, though similar, they are not identical. There’s the existence I have here at 34,000 feet and the one I have when I return to ground level. There’s the existence I was yesterday, am today, and will be tomorrow. A separation and cohesion I can experience but cannot explain.
From here, everything seems small. Distant. Insignificant. I imagine that if I can step back far enough, I could see some greater pattern or purpose. Some greater truth behind the suffering below. That the small tragedies, petty selfishness, and bitter conflicts that consume our daily lives below might resolve themselves if only everyone had this perspective.
But that is dilussional. This distance is its own form of complicity, a kind of spiritual disguise for my own indifference, priviledged by the distance of altitude. I’d like to believe that somewhere between the first-hand brutality of the world below and the serenity of the panorama seen here above through my window, there exists another way of seeing, and if I may be so bold, a better way of seeing. One that recognizes the messy particularities of human suffering while honoring some transcendent possibility that connection—not separation—might yet be our individual and collective salvation.
But this is a vertiginous space where perspective becomes complicity and compassion becomes evasion.
I’m longing for the past and future all at once. For the good parts I remember between the bad. For the good that could still be, if we just made it so. Through the passing clouds, I’m drawn to my memories of childhood in cars with my dad, his radio still echoing Nilsson:
“I’m goin’ to where the sun keeps shinin’, through the pourin’ rain. Goin’ where the weather suits my clothes.”
For a moment, I feel him here with me, his face in my reflection. Both of us suspended between earth and sky, between then and now. I smile as the song plays on.
What more is there than to long for a present better than the past, and a future better than now? What more is there than to see the unity in diversity, and the dignity beyond the cesspool that is society? What more is there than to treat my brother as my brother? My sister as my sister. To love others as I would myself.
We’ve begun our descent, dropping slowly well beyond what was our cruising altitude. The horizon is already becoming flatter. The ground clearer. Our problems, more apparent. But the yearning never changes. It just moves from place to place, time after time. Soon, I will be in another place where I must put my longing aside so that I may be, just for a short time, be of use to others—be something more than this eccentric mortal creature that I am.
Yet again, I must rejoin the world as it is, not as I wish it to be.
Dean Bowman
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