Chapter 1, Page 1

I leaned my forehead against the window of seat 26F. Rain pattered on the outside of the plane as the passengers finished boarding for our flight from Atlanta to Baltimore. I reflected on the past week which had been a welcome break from the hustle and bustle of my third year of law school.

A comment Mom had made on Saturday morning stuck in my mind. I had fought her at the time, insisting my blog was fine just the way it was. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that maybe change was finally necessary. I contemplated creating a new blog but that seemed too complicated. I didn't want to go through the process of setting up a new blog, editing all of my various social media platforms and redirecting friends and family to the new blog. Too much work. I wasn't ready to sacrifice everything I had previously written but I no longer wanted much of it to be public. I settled on a compromise: make the old posts private, redecorate and rename the blog. The new blog would complement another goal I had set for myself the night before: for the next year I would read what I termed "foundational" literature. From Austen to Steinbeck and from Alcott to Sinclair, I would focus on classics old and new. I wanted to do more than read the classics. I also wanted to read through foundational religious texts from the Catechism to the Book of Mormon to the Koran. I wanted to learn the roots of literature and religion.

As the last few passengers found their way into seats and closed their luggage into the overhead bins my ideas took shape. The blog would read like a book. No, like a collection of short stories. Like short stories, they would range from serious to silly and every phase in between. More than anything I wanted to pull out my laptop and stop working but the door was closing and we were pushing back from the gate. No access to electronics until we got off the ground. I buried my nose in my book, print for once instead of my beloved Kindle, and tuned out the flight attendant as she went through the safety regulations. I knew my seat cushion could be used as a flotation device and that in the event of a sudden drop in cabin pressure, oxygen masks would drop from the ceiling. I knew to put my mask on first and help anyone else second and that even if the bag didn't fully inflate, oxygen was flowing.  I did briefly pause to locate the two closest exits; I had this strange superstition that the one time I failed to find the closest exits would be the one time the plane went down. I knew that my finding the exits had nothing to do with the how the flight would progress but I checked nevertheless. It's strange how the little things can make us comfortable and safe.

A short time later we were on the ground at BWI and it was time to collect my belongings and deplane. As I stretched and slipped into my backpack I tucked my plans for the new blog into a safe place in my mind. I turned my attention from blog designs to my schedule for the rest of the day and stepped off the plane with a new plan and a new direction.