On the Timelessness of Flying – A Fold in the Fabric of Time

Sunlight streams through the window. The roar of the engines is getting quieter. The distant click of a seatbelt. Then silence. Just for a moment. But the moment is magical. I lean back and look out of the window. Below me the clouds, above me the endless blue. I am no longer where I came from. I'm not yet where I'm on my way to be. I'm just here, seat number 8F on the flight to ... wherever.

I am here now – in a space between past and future; in a space of absolute present. Ab-solut, Latin, means de-tached, at rest in itself, free. This moment is like that. The excitement of the last few hours is forgotten. Everything that had to be done has been done. The goodbyes, the shopping, the queues. The last WhatsApp is written. Everything is said and done. I'm still hours away from arrival. Whatever awaits me there can wait. The tablet stays in my hand luggage, the smartphone in my jacket pocket. Even my headphones aren't on yet. Now is different. This moment is a gift. It feels like a wrinkle in the fabric of time. And I slip deep into it.

Composers are familiar with the fermata: an interruption in which a note – or the silence between notes – is prolonged. The music pauses. All sounds gather in this moment. And the silence itself, from which every sound and every tone originates, becomes audible in the most intense way. This moment is such a fermata: a bursting moment – bursting with presence, liveliness, and pure, intense being. It is free of all nothingness: free of no more, not yet, not now.

That freedom above the clouds must be “boundless“ has become commonplace thanks to Reinhard Mey's famous song. In this magical moment, however, I realize the deeper meaning of these words. It is probably not the freedom of movement that we so envy in birds because, unlike us, they can dodge not only left and right, but also up and down. No, the limitless freedom above the clouds is freedom from the temporality and finiteness of existence – freedom from the worries that otherwise imprison us. It is freedom from our needy ego, which is always one step ahead of itself; always halfway to the future with what it wants and hopes and desires ... All this comes to rest in this magical moment. I have no worries; I have no desires. I don't want because I am.

The deeper I glide into the fermata, the more the space within and without unfolds – a magical correspondence, a wondrous resonance. The infinity of the sky opens up in my heart and fills it with an almost forgotten love. Yes, I love this blue sky. Yes, I love that bright sun. Yes, I love these clouds. Yes, I love this old earth stretching 30,000 feet below me. Yes, I love this journey of life through the boundless ocean of time, forgotten in this moment.

They say time flies. It’s true, but not in the conventional sense that time becomes shorter when you fly, so that you feel the journey took less time than planned. No, in that magical moment of travel, time itself has passed, disappeared, submerged in the fermata of the fulfilled moment.

A passenger stands up in front of me. A monitor flickers beside me. Snippets of conversation reach my ears. Everyday life has returned to me, time is flowing again as it used to, from now to now. But something has changed. I look at the world differently – with an inner smile that will stay with me for the next few hours. The flight attendant hands me a glass of water. I say, "Thank you.” And I mean so much more than she can imagine at that moment.

About:

Christoph Quarch is a philosopher, author, and speaker who teaches ethics, business philosophy, and philosophy at several universities in Germany. He focuses on the pressing questions of 21st-century society.