Sully

Just as I was contemplating what to write about today, I heard my mailman's truck on the street and the familiar dull click of my neighbor's mailbox door being shut.  So, I waited a while and soon I heard the mail truck (sounding as though it needed a tune-up) at the end of my driveway, and then the dull click of my box door going shut.

Zorro and I made the trek to the mailbox, and there within were two pieces of mail. One from a local Realtor, the other the newest AARP Bulletin.  I took my cup of coffee and sat outside on my back patio and began to thumb through the Bulletin.

On page 10, I saw the picture of a guy I admire greatly. The headline read Conversation With Sully Sullenberger.  By Hugh Delehanty.  You do remember Sully, don't you.  The pilot that landed his jet liner in, (on) the Hudson River.  An event that came to be known as "Miracle on the Hudson".

What a great guy!  So humble, so 'not' wanting to be a hero. So eager to want the episode to blend into the background, like a grey tapestry.  To this day he continues to tell people that 'miracle' was a group effort, saying, "...(that) experience and the judgment my crew and I developed over many decades allowed us to have the creative reserve to deliver the airplane full of people to the surface intact".

Anyway, anytime I hear or see anything new about Sully, I'm immediately interested.  And so it was this morning I read the entire interview.

Here are two of the questions that were asked, and Sully's answers.

Q:  It's been five years since the "miracle on the Hudson," How did that event change your life?
A:  It was, at first, very difficult, very shocking, but with time you have to make it part of you, not simply something that happened to you.

Q:  What about you is different?
A:  It's made me think that whatever trivial things I have to deal with don't even hold a candle to that.

I thought they were great questions, and about all the ways Sully could have answered them.  If a proud and pompous man, he could have given puffed up, peacock pretty answers.  Instead, he gave (in my opinion) true hero answers.  The Miracle on the Hudson, was simply one square, one part of all the colors in his tapestry of life.  Simply put, part of him.  

And, isn't it true, that like Sully, our lives too, are squares? With each event, large or small, brightly coloring our tapestry of life.  It is how we allow the events of our lives to affect us that make us who we are.

Here is how I would answer those two questions.

Q:  "In the last five years how have the events of your life changed you?"
A:  I want to believe they have become part of me, and are not just things that happened to me. So that whether earth shattering or minuscule they are woven into me, and have become part of my life tapestry.  

Q: "What about you is different?"
A:  I'm older and hopefully wiser, so that "whatever trivial things I have to deal with" in the future nothing will "hold a candle" to all the things that have happened in my past.

I think I would be uncomfortable living in a 'hero's' skin, I want to be a Sully and simply enjoy each moment, remembering it could be my last.