On Destinations and the Art of Flying
A Meditation on Love and Time
The restaurant hummed with the familiar music of Friday evening—silverware against plates, conversations weaving around each other like jazz improvisation, the soft percussion of lives being lived in real time. My friend sat across from me, her eyes bright with the kind of certainty that makes you lean forward and listen. "I know in my heart of hearts that I want to be married," she said, and then said again in different words, as if repetition could transform desire into destiny.
I asked her my favorite question—the one that opens doors we didn't know we'd locked: "What is marriage to you?" Her answer came wrapped in practicalities: legal union, shared life, support with aging parents. The architecture of commitment built from the outside in, blueprints drawn before the foundation was laid. Through our conversation, a pattern emerged like photographs developing in darkroom solution. The relationships that had left the deepest (not always savory) impressions were with men who spoke of marriage early and often, as if the word itself was a promise, a guarantee, a spell that could conjure forever.
But something about this sat wrong with me, like a song played in the wrong key. The power of time, as mindfulness teaches us, lies not in racing toward future moments but in being fully present—in the wind through trees, the touch of fabric against skin, the way love reveals itself in ordinary Tuesday afternoons when no one is performing commitment.
I told her I wanted something different: a relationship so secure in its own gravity that it didn't require the conversation to define the relationship, didn't need the destination to validate the journey. Don't misunderstand—I am open to marriage, perhaps especially after my first one ended. That marriage was built from reactivity, each decision a response to the previous crisis: pregnancy, then wedding, then house, then all the boxes we checked while forgetting to ask if we wanted to be in the same room, much less the same life and why.
What I learned from that dissolution was this: I had attached myself to destinations while ignoring the quality of the vehicle carrying me there. This exact moment will never happen again, and yet I had spent so many moments living in service of a future that anxiety whispered in my ear like a false prophet.
My friend and I began to see the pattern: those men who "got away" were the ones who spoke of marriage as destination, and she had immediately begun planning her route there, violating her own boundaries like a traveler ignoring road signs, wondering why she felt so lost when they inevitably disappeared. The destination had become more real than the person sitting across from her, more important than the way he treated her or community members or what made him laugh or whether his presence felt like coming home or going into exile.
This is when the metaphor arrived, as they do—sideways and sudden and perfect. She spoke of taking a plane to a destination, marriage as the place where the journey ends. But I found myself thinking of something else entirely: What if marriage isn't the destination but the plane itself? What if love is learning to build something together that can carry not just the two of you but all the people you serve, all the dreams you're brave enough to speak out loud, all the versions of yourselves you haven't met yet?
My plane—and I am always building it, always learning to fly it better—would have multiple destinations, stops along the way where some passengers disembark and others climb aboard. Some would stay for the duration, witnesses to every takeoff and landing. The work wouldn't be reaching a place but maintaining the vessel: checking engines, reading weather patterns, practicing the delicate art of shared navigation in love, in trust, in respect. Because what happens when you reach your destination? Life doesn't pause to applaud your arrival. You step off the plane into another moment that demands your presence, your choices, your willingness to keep becoming.
As Seneca knew, "Every day as it comes should be welcomed and reduced forthwith into our own possession as if it were the finest day imaginable. What flies past has to be seized at." The power of time lies not in its promise of future fulfillment but in its insistence on now—this conversation, this breath, this choice to love not because of where it might lead but because of where it is leading you right now.
We are always passing through: relationships, seasons, beliefs, versions of ourselves we once thought were permanent. There is always an "and" on the other side of whatever destination our psyche has fixed upon. Mindfulness offers a doorway to the richness and depth of the present moment, enabling us to live more fully and authentically, not in service of some imagined future but in the radical act of showing up for what is actually happening.
My friend had been making decisions from the future, her heart and mind stationed at some imagined altar while her actual life waited in the present moment like an unopened letter. When we practice mindfulness, we learn to appreciate the present moment and reduce our stress and anxiety—not by abandoning our dreams but by refusing to sacrifice our actual lives to them.
Love, real love, is not a destination but a way of traveling. It's building something together that can handle turbulence, that's maintained with attention and intention, that carries you not toward some predetermined end but deeper into the mystery of what it means to be human together, to choose each other again and again in the endless series of presents that make up a life.
The plane is the practice. The journey is the point. And every moment you spend learning to fly together is a moment you'll never get back, a moment that contains everything you've been searching for in some imagined tomorrow.
The power of time is not in its passage but in its presence. The power of love is not in its promises but in its practice. And the art of living—the real art—is learning to be so present in your own life that you don't need to escape to the future to find what you're looking for.
It's already here. It's always been here. You just have to remember to land.
