“Ladies and gentlemen, it appears there is a weather condition in Medford that may impede our ability to land. Current visibility is such that we cannot get permission to approach the runway at this time and may need to divert to Redmond.”
Redmond is 125 miles East of Medford and my head began to ache with the possibility of being loaded onto a bus for that long, curvy trek across the Cascades. I immediately began to doubt the information the captain had just given us. How could this be possible? It had been so crystal clear for my entire trip that there couldn’t POSSIBLY be enough clouds or fog or WHATEVER to prevent us from landing!!! I mean, REALLY, can’t he just look outside and see that it is crystal clear? And besides, its not even winter time yet so again, he must have bad information!!!
We circled Medford for about 10 minutes, and as we looked down out of our windows the report was confirmed. Everything as far as the eye could see was perfectly clear and sunny, with the exception of the little valley Medford seemed to be sitting in. Medford was solidly packed with fog. Perhaps the captain did know more about the situation than I did.
It wasn’t long before I laughed at how my own desire to get home had begun to cloud the facts we had been given, and how I used my own current experience to prove my own point of view. I began to use my own experience of cloudless skies to second guess the new information and reports of cloudy skies for others.
The same thing happened when I read a newspaper article yesterday about a law regarding child abandonment. Two years ago the State of Nebraska enacted a law called “safe haven”. The law stated that children could be abandoned at hospitals without parents fearing legal action. The law was created to prevent parents from abandoning their babies in dumpsters. It was decided that people unable to cope with parenthood needed a safe option. However, as it turned out, the law is now being used in an unexpected way. In the course of the past year over 30 children had been deposited into hospitals and abandoned there to become the responsibility of the state. The majority of these children ranged in age from 11-17. I was immediately appalled. How on earth could any parent simply drive their child to a local hospital and leave them there? One nurse reported a little 6 year old boy pleading with his mother, “mommy, I’ll be good, I promise I’ll be good, just don’t leave me here.” My heart broke, and I immediately began to judge and condemn these parents as unloving, uncaring and overwhelming selfish.
Then I read on.
The reasons for these abandonment’s varied widely. Some of the children left behind were incorrigible teenagers and the parents felt they had exhausted every avenue of assistance and were simply at their wits end. One young teenager had become so violent and aggressive he had become a danger to the rest of his family. One young single mother had done all she could do to feed and house her child, she was now homeless and hopeless and this seemed the most compassionate option for her child so that she would not have to live on the streets and be subject to the violence there. Another single father was mentally ill and feared for the safety of his child based on his own inability to cope.
These are people in severe pain and distress, more than I could even pretend to truly comprehend. Their lives were not the same lives I had lived. Their view from the foggy basin of the valley was not the same view from high in the sky as I rode along in the plane.
It wasn’t until we finally landed and I disembarked that I saw and felt how dark and heavy the fog really was. I quickly put on my jacket and wrapped my scarf tightly around my neck. The dense heaviness of the wet fog immediately soaked into my body and I could feel the cold dark oppression. Our landing had felt completely blind. There was zero visibility and it was obvious we were landing with extreme technological assistance. Only then did I have a deeper understanding that I only ever have a piece of the picture. I have only my own vantage point. There was obviously more to know and understand in just about any situation than simply what I knew to be true for myself.
I know it is said to “never judge a man until you have walked a mile in his shoes.” I guess this is just a long way around to saying the same thing. The cloudless flight reminded me that my vantage point of life is very limited and specific only to my own experiences-and the world is oh-so-much more than that. In the future I’ll be reminding myself gently to be on the look out for a more global perspective on life’s multilayered issues.
