T
hirty Thousand Days
A
J o u r n a l
f o r
P u r p o s e f u l
L i v i n g
Attention
Self-Reflection
Morita Therapy
Purposeful Action
Naikan
Challenging
Children
Living Fully
with Illness
Gratitude
I
Three Things I Learned
While My Plane Crashed
By Ric Elias
magine a big explosion as you climb through 3,000
ft. Imagine a plane full of smoke. Imagine an engine
going clack, clack, clack, clack, clack, clack, clack.
It sounds scary. Well I had a unique seat that day. I was
sitting in 1D. I was the only one who could talk to the
flight attendants. So I looked at them right away, and they
said, “No problem. We probably hit some birds.” The pilot
had already turned the plane around, and we weren’t that
far. You could see Manhattan. Two minutes later, three
things happened at the same time. The pilot lines up the
plane with the Hudson River. That’s usually not the route.
He turns off the engines. Now imagine being in a plane
with no sound. And then he says three words — the most
unemotional three words I’ve ever heard. He says, “Brace
for impact.” I didn’t have to talk to the flight attendant anymore. I could see in her eyes, it was terror. Life was over.
Now I want to share with you three things I learned
about myself that day. I learned that it all changes in an
instant. We have this bucket list, we have these things we
want to do in life, and I thought about all the people I
wanted to reach out to that I didn’t, all the fences I wanted
to mend, all the experiences I wanted to have and I never
did. As I thought about that later on, I came up with a saying, which is, “I collect bad wines.” Because if the wine is
ready and the person is there, I’m opening it. I no longer
want to postpone anything in life. And that urgency, that
purpose, has really changed my life.
A Publ ic at ion of t he ToDo Ins t i t u t e
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