Small Airplanes - part two

I was sitting in seat 10A watching the lady across from me work on a puzzle book of some kind. She moved her pen around trying to find the number that was missing from her puzzle in order to fill in all the boxes. I will admit, I hate doing stuff like that. Why would you sit for hours and do that when you could be reading a book. My thought is, I have enough unsolved puzzles in my life, I sure am not going to buy a book full of them and sit for hours trying to figure them out. No, thanks! My life is full of HIV, hunger, lack of housing and the need for education, only to mention a few.

I was looking at the way she was dressed to see if that helped me understand what she could have been thinking to buy this book. Her hair was very neat, not one hair out of order. I thought about my hair. Mine? Well, my hair has a mind of it's own most days so I wasn't sure that was a good test. She was on puzzle sixty-nine, she had skipped sixty-eight completely. Obviously, a flaw in her very orderly personality was my thought. As she worked to finish the puzzle I could see she wasn't coming up with the answers that she needed. I was no longer tracking with Donald Miller and the "lifeboat theory". Everyone in the boat would have to wait as I watched her pen move faster and faster like it was going to help her find the missing number. She was checking her self over and over again.

Finally, she cracked the back of the book open and took a quick peak at the "puzzle key" finding that she had the wrong number in one of the boxes. That is why she couldn't move forward. No matter how fast she moved her pen and reworked the math in her mind she was stuck. With the problem solved she flipped back to the puzzle, wrote a seven over the four and kept going.

With the problem solved, her pen was moving slowly over the numbers again as if nothing happened. I wasn't sure why she had been working the puzzle in pen? It seemed to me she should have been doing it in pencil so she could erase her mistake. Maybe people with every hair in place use pen and people with messy hair use pencil?

When she peaked at the key to the puzzle it was like it didn't count since she just barely cracked the book open to get the answer. There seems to be a unwritten rule some where that says, if you only peek, you aren't really cheating. I know this rule from playing these puzzle games as a kid. It wasn't long after she peeked that she seemed to get bored with sixty-nine. She skipped seventy just as she had skipped sixty-eight and now her pen was slowly moving over the number pattern on seventy-one. I am sure she had a reason for this. Why she was working every other puzzle and not finishing the ones she started.

It seemed to me to be a clue on how we live our lives. Only doing every other puzzle, hoping that our life comes with all the answers in the back of the book so to speak so that we can quickly move on, not honestly correcting our mistakes. I completely understand how she was working the puzzles book. We leave gaps and holes in things never finishing things we start, moving quickly on to the next thing. Out of site, out of mind. End of story.

We live for immediate gratification, needing to finish things quickly. However, we are clearly unable to see the errors in our ways, our choices and other calculations. For the woman sitting in seat 9C it was harmless. In the world of a five dollar puzzle books it was harmless. People are passing the time on a two hour flight getting from point A to point B.

Watching her reminded me how many times in the last year I have wanted to peak at the answers to all of life's many questions. No, such luck! Someone said to me this week, it is about your character Sheila and our need to remain humble and teachable.