The sky’s shake but my heart doesn’t

I think I’m afraid of flying.

There. I said it.

Which is absurd coming from someone who takes over 30+ flights a year. I don’t really know where it started. It lives somewhere in the back of my brain, waiting. It’s probably smaller than I make it out to be, but it is always there. A strange fear that only shows up once I am strapped into a seat, ears popping, cabin air smelling faintly of jet fuel and stale coffee, and the seatbelt sign chiming as a reminder that I am no longer in charge.

Imagine telling someone 120 years ago that one day, 200 people would sit inside an aluminum tube, flying 600 miles an hour, crossing oceans in a matter of hours. London to New York before your body even registers jet lag. It would have sounded like science fiction. Or arrogance. Or both.

I’m writing this right now over the Atlantic Ocean. We just took off from London, and we have had two hours and thirty seven minutes of constant turbulence. Not the occasional bump. The kind that rattles your teeth. The kind where the wings look like they’re flapping if you stare too long. The kind where even the flight attendants let out a small scream, which is concerning, because your entire job is to not do that. Like let me live a little and shriek too.

To make things better, they gave me the very last row on the plane. All the way in the back, next to the bathroom. Where you feel everything. Every dip, every drop, every reminder that physics is having a moment. I felt like a cowboy at a rodeo, hanging on for dear life, except the bull is 35,000 feet in the air.

I understand the physics. I know planes don’t just fall out of the sky. I know turbulence is just uneven air. I know the pilot has control the entire time. None of that really helps.

Then it clicked.

It was never about flying.
It was never about altitude.
It was never about death.

It was about control.

Two outcomes

What actually calms me is something darker and simpler. There are only two outcomes.

Either we land this plane, or this plane ends up in the Arctic Ocean and I am buried at sea next to the Titanic. Literally the same area. The only difference is I don’t have a young Leonardo DiCaprio waiting to save me a spot on a floating door.

And honestly, I don’t think this fear is a problem.

Flying will continue to exist whether I like it or not. Thirty seven million flights a year. Only a handful of accidents. Any rational person takes those odds. Yes, it is safer than driving a car. But rationality is a modern luxury. A hundred years ago, flight itself would have sounded reckless. Unnatural. A violation of how things were meant to be.

Inheritance

When I hear stories about my grandfather traveling for hours, then days, then weeks, riding and sailing just to reach Hajj, I feel overwhelming gratitude that I can board a plane at all. I wish I could sit with him and ask what it felt like the first time he left the ground. What it meant to trust something he didn’t fully understand, simply because the intention mattered more than the fear.

As the skies shake and the wings bend under pressure, I am confronted with the illusion of control.

I am just a passenger on this plane.

And that realization does something to me. Because this plane is life. This world is temporary. Fleeting. We are moving forward whether we like it or not, strapped into seats we didn’t design, trusting systems we didn’t build, headed toward destinations we don’t fully see. The sooner you accept that you aren’t in the cockpit, the lighter the ride becomes.

At the end of the day, everything we worry about is usually everything we have not trusted God with. Tawakkul is not passivity. It is clarity. It is knowing when effort ends and surrender begins.

People love to say, “You ain’t the passenger, you’re the pilot.” It sounds empowering. It sells books. But the moment you realize no one knows the exact route, how much fuel is left, or when turbulence hits, you understand the truth. We are all passengers. Every single one of us. Just trying to act confident while the seatbelt sign flickers on and off.

The illusion of control

We live in an age obsessed with control.
Self control sermons clipped into short videos.
Brands trying to control narratives when their PR collapses.
People mapping out five year plans like the future read the Notion doc and agreed.

Even self sabotage is rooted in control. We sabotage because it lets us predict pain. If we cause it, at least it is familiar. If we ruin something ourselves, we don’t have to sit with the terror of losing it unexpectedly. Control becomes a shield, even when it hurts us.

This isn’t an essay about predestination, or debates about what is written. This is about letting go of what was never ours to hold. Yes, take responsibility for your life. Build. Act. Move. Create impact. But stop pretending you are meant to carry the weight of outcomes you cannot influence. That illusion is what feeds anxiety, depression, and quiet despair.

If something isn’t within your immediate ability to change, decide, or meaningfully affect, then it isn’t worthy of your constant worry. You ain’t behind. You are not late. You are exactly where you need to be.

I think about this like premature engineering, the death of good builders. Over optimizing systems before the problem exists. Burning energy solving hypothetical failures.

Life works the same way.

You deal with problems when they arrive. Planning is useful when outcomes are clear. But in life, no one knows what happens on any timeline. The attempt to control everything does not make you safer. It just makes you tired.

You cannot control the wind, but you can adjust your sails.
So grow with the flow.

Letting the ride continue

Somewhere in the middle of all this shaking, I tried talking to the woman next to me. A seventy year old Polish woman from Chicago. Sometimes speaking to a stranger helps normalize fear. Before I could even say anything, she sensed it. She smiled gently and said, “We will be alright.”

We talked. She told me about her grandson, how proud she was of him, all his accomplishments. At some point, I realized we were the same age, in the same profession.

It made me think about how little time I had with my own grandparents. They lived on different continents, in a world where flying was rare and distance actually meant something. So I didn’t see them the way this woman saw her grandson. I let her words land where they needed to. Maybe she was projecting. Maybe I was receiving something I didn’t know I had been missing.

She wasn’t afraid, not of the turbulence nor of the uncertainty. She’d lived long enough to know that worrying about the plane doesn’t change whether it lands.

The turbulence continued. The wings kept bending. But I stopped gripping the armrest as tight. The plane keeps moving forward.

So does life.

I let my heart learn what this little old lady already knew. Turbulence is not the enemy, resistance is.

Trusting the ride doesn’t mean you’re weak.
It means you finally understand how little you were meant to carry.